Thaw
by sophiesix
Summary: Flame, Blackheath, and an unnamed child find their lives in limbo. Follows Vision of Kings
1. Chapter 1

_Flame, Blackheath, and an unnamed child find their lives in limbo._

* * *

**Thaw**

_Fear, Grief, and Hatred freeze a person's experience of life. But life is in a constant state of flux. It cannot be frozen. If you cannot change, you do not live._

A human child, found alone deep in Soul territory, no identifying possessions, no voice, no name, like she had appeared out of thin air. And it seems no one is looking for her. Where is her father? What is she afraid of?

A world away, another father is absent.

Ayasha sits with Alex, waiting for him to wake up, while Flame follows memories to find him.

Will father and daughter be reunited?

Central to the resolution of both situations, Blackheath is trapped in the wrong place, with both time and the law against him.

* * *

**Prologue**

*******

Though his eyes were closed, he knew that she was there. He could feel her rubbing her thumb over his arm, both lightly and firmly, her motion smooth and continuous, delineating the muscles, pushing a wedge of touch up to his shoulder along the furrow between the muscle and bone, running her forefinger around his shoulder bones and along the slight shelf of his collarbone. Blackheath lay still, enjoying her touch more than he could say, but resting immobile, head on his forearms, in case he broke her spell and she disapperared.

When she pressed her cheek to his naked back, he woke. And like every time he woke since he had lost her, he felt her absence like a knife in his throat.

* * *

Thanks to:

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt. Susan Sontag

_This is the hour of lead_

_Remembered if outlived_

_As freezing persons recollect the snow_

_First chill, then stupor, then the letting go_

Emily Dickinson

Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason that the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. Michel de Montaigne

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. James Joyce

Water cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it Song of Solomon

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream. Michel de Montaigne


	2. Chapter 2 Charlotte

PART ONE

- DISCONNECTED -

* * *

**Charlotte**

*******

"Is she sedated?"

"No, this is just how she is, since she came in. You try and talk to her; you'll make her cry, eventually. Otherwise, she just sits there, like frozen."

"Is she eating?"

"Sometimes. Not if you look at her. If you take her into the shower she'll just stand there, and you have to dress and undress her like she's some stiff little doll."

"And she's otherwise well?"

"As far as we can tell."

I let the duty nurse go. Late Sunday night was not my favourite time for a psych call out. But I knew they would have to be really worried to call me on a Sunday. And this girl was worrying. Through the glass window I could see her sitting on the floor, her back pressed against the wall, arms wrapped tight around her knees, silent.

A human child, found alone in the city, no identifying possessions, no voice, no name. And no one looking for her. It was like she had appeared out of thin air. She looked like she desperately wanted to return there, disappear from the cold vinyl floors and sleek walls of the empty children's ward.

I entered the ward and sat down on the floor next to her. I studied the wall opposite. She stiffened, waiting, but I could play that game. She rubbed her arms slowly, robotically, and I wondered if she was cold or afraid. Maybe both.

"Hi," I said softly. She was aware of me speaking; she tensed minutely. I had the feeling she was listening too.

"Do you mind if I sit with you for a while?"

She made no response, as if I didn't exist. I waited several more minutes, letting the silence stretch and stretch.

"They tell me you don't talk. That's fine by me. Some people talk too much."

She was definitely listening to me now, with the stillness of one concentrating hard on your words. I wondered if she spoke English.

I let the silence gather between us til it was as heavy as a cord binding us together. She made no move to break it. I drew up my knee and rested my lips on it. She stiffened in response to my movement, so I gathered she must have relaxed a little during the silence.

It was late, the streetlights outside invading the dim night lighting of the ward through the one window. They threw two sets of shadows around every occupant of the room: the bed posts, the drip poles, the monitoring machinery. This child was healthy, but the equipment stood waiting, ever ready for her to falter. I wondered if it scared her, these unknown machines she had as her only roommates.

In one smooth slow motion, I stood and left her. I'd had enough for tonight, and I daresay she had too. I looked back through the window and saw her legs crawling under the bed.

Hiding. From what?


	3. Chapter 3 Flame

**Flame**

*******

The lift doors opened, and I took a breath before I stepped out.

"She's not going to understand, Mum," Bhask said for the 99th time.

I shifted Yash to the other hip and ignored him, walking automatically to Alex's room. Long term care. I had spent more time here than I cared to think about. Yashie had spent months downstairs when she was born. What a family. And now Alex.

We got to the door of his room and Ayasha squirmed to be put down.

"Mum," Bhask said warningly.

"What do you want me to tell her?" I said, frustrated beyond civil ignorance, "I can't just leave her at home anymore. She'll think he's abandoned her. She wants to see him."

"But she won't-"

But I held his arm and we watched her drag a chair over to his bed, climb onto it and then onto the bed, settling herself by Alex's side, sitting up with her legs folded, twisting her fingers into eensy weensy spiders and humming softly. Bhask shook his head and marched over to her, but I stood still, my heart aching because I recognized what she was doing. I had seen her do this so many times at home, when Alex came back from an overseas trip exhausted and went straight to bed to sleep off the journey.

"Yashie, no-" Bhask started, but Ayasha put her finger to her lips.

"Sh Bhask!" she whispered, "Daddy's sleeping!" and Bhask stood helplessly by as she went back to her quiet games, content.

She was going to sit by her Daddy, her quiet, comatose Daddy, and she was going to wait for him to wake up. I gave Bhask a small, sad, smile of defeat. Weren't we doing exactly the same: sitting with him and waiting for him to wake? What else could we do?


	4. Chapter 4 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

***

The girl was back in the same place the next morning, on the floor, back pressed against the wall, arms wrapped tight around her knees, eyes wide, silent.

"Hi," I said. I didn't know if she recognized me. "Do you mind if I sit with you again?" I sat next to her slowly, refinding the familiar stretch of wall with my eyes, this time lit with pale morning light.

"You're pretty quiet, huh?"

Again the careful, listening, stillness.

"I don't mind that. Sometimes I don't feel like talking either."

I turned to look at her slowly. Her face was almost impassive, a mask, but her eyes were haunted, frozen on a spot half way to the floor. The empty ward loomed still around her.

"Sometimes I like talking though. Sometimes I like talking to my friends, or my family. It must get lonely, not being able to talk to anyone."

She started to cry softly, hiding her face in her arms. She must be lonely. I looked at her unhappily, wishing I could comfort her.

"I'm sorry," I said softly, "I don't want to upset you. It just makes me sad, to see you lonely like this. I know you don't like to talk about some things, but it makes it awful lonely if you can't talk about anything. I'd like to talk to you. Is there anything we can talk about, that won't upset you?"

She glanced at me, but said nothing. I was encouraged; she had initiated eye contact, this was a major step. I gave her time, waiting for her to find a topic she was comfortable with.

"I like your dress," she said finally in a small strained voice.

"My dress? Well, thank you." I waited, but she didn't offer anything more, mask perfectly in place. Still, she had reached out, made contact: she wanted to communicate. This made me determined to find a way she could, without being terrified, without bursting into tears.

"I'd say I like yours too, but that wouldn't be the truth. That's what they give all the kids to wear, and I know they're scratchy."

She stared at the floor so long, I wondered if I'd offended her.

"I'm sorry, I can't talk to you," she whispered, tension dragging at her words, "Daddy said I can't."

"Can't talk to strangers?"

She nodded.

"Well, then I should introduce myself. Hi, I'm Charlotte, nice to meet you."

She glanced at me hopefully, then a darkness came over her face and she looked away.

"No name, huh?"

She shook her head.

"I'm sorry," she breathed forlornly.

"That's ok, honey. You let me know if you think of one you can tell me. I'd imagine you must miss your daddy. Any little girl would miss her daddy, don't you think?"

She nodded. I hesitated, then took the plunge.

"I'd like to get you back to him, he must be worried about you."

But she stiffened.

"Ok. I'm not supposed to talk about that, huh? Can I ask you, though, if you _want_ to go back to your Daddy? You don't have to answer."

She was silent so long I thought I'd lost her for this session. But as I got up to go, she spoke, so quietly it was less than a whisper.

"Yes."

The yearning in her voice froze me in my tracks. I leant and squeezed her shoulder gently.

"Thank you for talking to me today, honey, you did really well."

"You're going away now, aren't you," she said in that same sad voice, catching me by surprise.

"Yes, I am."

"Are you coming back?"

"Would you like me to?"

She nodded, but continued to stare at the floor.

"Okay. I'll see you later then."

"Well?"

"She's terrified."

"Kinda had that figured already." The head of child psychiatry gave me a long even look, but I was used to him and went on.

"She's lost contact with her Dad somehow, I don't know if he's dead or-"

"What? How do you figure that? That whole Dad thing?"

"She told me."

"She _told _you. I am impressed, Miss Charlotte. She actually spoke to you?"

I nodded. He shook his head in amazement.

"Well there you go. That mean you're taking her on?"

"If that's possible, yes, I'd like to."

"Be my guest."

She was on my mind as I prepared my dinner .

Not to talk to strangers… that was a human thing to say. Was it possible the child was a wild born human? It made no sense, that she should be found so far into Soul territory. But it would explain why there was no trace of her, no reports of a missing child… had her father dropped her here to be implanted? Unlikely, but possible. Why else would a father abandon a child? Perhaps her mother had died, and he felt this was the best option for her. Or perhaps the father had not been involved in the decision, and the family had decided. Perhaps her father was looking for her too. In that case, I would need to get her back to the Soul-free Zone.


	5. Chapter 5 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

*******

The strip of sunlight burned in its corner, trembling with each shudder of the road beneath the trucks team of wheels. Its heat inflamed the metal walls of the container, reaching even to the opposite corner, where the man crouched in the shadows, sweating, bracing against each jarring shudder, breath spearing the air with hisses. One hand was clamped over a dark stain, trying to hold the bullet steady in the muscle, pressing against the steady flow of blood. The other kept his belt strangled tight above the wound, a circular vice compressing his thigh and slowing the loss of blood.

But the pain wasn't as bad as the knowledge that he was trapped, and being inexorably taken further and further from the city, further and further from what he had inadvertently left behind. Inadvertent, what did that matter? The accidental nature of the events had made them all the more devastating.

A meeting place deep in enemy territory. It was a bold move, and purposefully so; only careful and skilled players would make it, culling the weaker. Automatically selecting the people ready for blunt action.

But these were also the people on the leading edge of antagonistic. People easily pushed over the edge.

And diplomacy had never been his strong point.

And so he had ended up shot. Luckily, they used silencers, and hadn't brought a squadron of Seekers down on them all. And luckily he had been able to push through the pain and run for the heavy transport hub, losing them in the containers and alleyways where a group couldn't follow without attracting attention. He had holed up in this truck, half empty and deserted. But as he had jerked his belt tighter above the gunshot wound, the container doors had shut and bolted, and the truck grumbled to life, winding through the suburbs, picking up speed on the highway, and pulling for a long distance destination. Leaving her alone and hidden in the city, waiting for him to return.

There was nothing he could do. Even if he could somehow attract the driver's attention, he would most likely be a Soul, and that would be the end of that. All he could hope for was that this truck was bound for a human settlement. He just had to hold on til he got there.

Then he would go back and find her.


	6. Chapter 6 Flame

**Flame**

*******

Time dragged on my eyelids. I hefted them open again, but the scene was the same. Alex lying as if dead, apart from the rise and fall of his chest, the flickering of the lights on his monitors, and Ayasha, leaning on him gently, infinitely patient, waiting. The sight tore anew at my heart, though I saw it everyday.

From this angle it looked like he was a boat she was sitting in. It reminded me of last summer…

Alex was cruising shark-like around the swimming hole, Yashie propped on his back and holding onto his neck, like a whalerider. Intermittently Bhask would surface with a hug gasp, then duck dive to the bottom again, searching for a stone George had thrown him.

I sat at the water's edge with my feet in the water, trying to stay calm. George sat beside me doing a much better job. It was stinking hot. Even in the shade of the trees around the waterhole the heat hung in the air, dragging everything down. But nothing was tempting me to get in the water.

"Bhask tells me you used to like swimming," George said.

"Uh huh," I replied, wiping the sweat off my forehead.

"Tell me what you liked about it before."

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"It was… um… peaceful… it was…"

I had trouble remembering how that felt. It was very different to how I felt about it now. Now, I watched it swirl round my knees, heavy and dark, dragging at me, waiting for me to slip. So long as I kept looking at it, and concentrated, I could keep my legs in the water. But nothing more. I breathed deeply, trying to reassure my lungs with as much air as I could.

"Just don't think about it," Alex called gently, pushing off the other bank to make a little bow wave in front of him. Yashie watched it, pleased.

I laughed shortly, fear cutting it short. _Yeah right._

"You're very good at not thinking about things when you want to," he said, and though his voice was calm, I knew he was thinking of the many times I had avoided thinking about him, or Bhask, or fully explored the consequences of my actions. But this, this I couldn't control. The fear was clamped around my mind seamlessly, and I couldn't find an edge to pry it away.

"You can swim, you know," Bhask said, floating on his back to catch his breath, "Yashie will be swimming before you do."

Yashie already knew how to swim. I knew this, but I also knew I wasn't supposed to know it. I had seen Bhask teaching her, like I had taught him when he was little. Like I should have already done with Ayasha, if my fear hadn't crippled me. Bhask didn't know I secretly watched him when he secretly took Yashie to the waterhole. I didn't want him to know I didn't trust him in the deep water. Because it wasn't him that I didn't trust: it was the water.

"Come on, Mum-"

"Let her be," Alex told him, pushing off the other bank and gliding serenely through the water.

I wished I could join them. I wished I could conquer this. But they didn't know how much it took me to just sit here on the edge, so close to what I feared, my feet even touching it, letting it surround my legs and grasp at them.

"Mum," said a small voice. I looked up in surprise. Yashie was holding her hand out like a queen, reaching for me, and like a queen, expected to be instantly obeyed. My fingers tightened their hold on the grassy bank.

"Mum!" she said, frowning, not understanding why I didn't come to her immediately. I bit my lip. I hated to see my baby frown. The others watched me silently, and the air seemed to be so heavy and still that everyone must've been holding their breath together. I watched in agony as Ayasha's little forehead crumpled in frustration. She jigged her hand at me.

As slowly as I could, I eased myself down into the water til my toes felt the soft bottom, the water rising shocking cold around me. Here, I could stand, the water reaching half way up my waist. It sucked at my legs, encircling my belly. I breathed with my mouth open, holding my arms out of the water, watching my baby desperately. They watched me back from the other side of the water hole, as still as hippopotamus. _Why _couldn't they just come over? It was so much easier for them. Surely they wouldn't make me _swim._

I couldn't bear for the water to cover my chest, my lungs, surround my neck. I was panicking just thinking about it. Alex watched me panic, calmly treading water. How could he be so cruel?

"Mum?" Yashie said softly, her eyes lost, wondering why on earth I still wouldn't come. My heart was tearing in two.

I pushed off the edge and the water embraced me, sliding around my back, weighing on each gasping breath. I kept my eyes on Ayasha's, and forced myself to just kick and stroke, kick and stroke, the rhythm helping me keep the panic under control, but my mind was filled with memories of biting cold, burning lungs, water imprisoning my frantic, clawing hands, darkness seeping down my limbs. As I edged closer Alex took Yashie's hands and pulled her off, trying to give her to me.

"Alex, don't!" I said, my voice almost a sob. But my arms grabbed her automatically, and she grasped my neck with affectionate lip smacks. One arm held her tight, and my other clamped onto Alex's shoulder. Finally, finally, something solid. His arm cradled me, taking my weight away from the pull of the water, holding me close.

"Alright?" he asked softly, but I couldn't reply, burying my face in his shoulder. It took all my effort just to hold onto them tight and breath. Alex reached out with his free arm and pulled us smoothly through the water, back towards the bank. As soon as I could reach it I hauled myself out and lay down full length on the grass, feeling the solid world beneath my heavy limbs, worshipping the way air surrounded me, and I only had to relax to breathe. Yashie wriggled away and Alex pulled her back into the swimming hole, gliding away from the bank again.

_I hate you Alex_, I thought impulsively, wretchedly, _for making me do that_. But I said nothing, pressing my cheek into the grass, eyes closed tight, and feeling the panic slowly ebb away. I knew I didn't really hate him. I hated the whole situation: the oppressive heat, the dark malevolence of the water, the ease with which the others enjoyed it and I couldn't.

And most of all, the crippling fear that kept me locked away from them.

***

"Mum?" Bhask said, and I came back to the present in a blink. "You ok?"

"I'm fine," I whispered, frowning, chasing away the memories and stretching my back uncomfortably, "You taking over?"

He nodded. Bhask slept at the hospital while I went home. Neither of us wanted Alex to be alone there.

"Watch Yashie for a sec? I'm just going to get some coffee," I said, walking zombie-like for the coffee station round the corner. I pressed the glowing buttons and stared mindlessly at the brown liquid jetting into my cup.

As I walked back down the corridor, I heard Yashie scream. I dropped the coffee and ran for the room. Bhask cringing away from her, and she was glaring at him from the bed. I had never seen a more foul expression my Yashie's face.

"I just tried to pick her up!" Bhask said, astonished, "She just _screamed_, and, and I think she was going to _bite_ me!"

"I don't think she's going anywhere tonight," I sighed, leaning on the doorframe. There was no way Ayasha was giving up her Dad so soon.

"Whoa!" I heard someone yelp behind me, slipping on my coffee. I went to clean it up, then drove home alone through the dark and the snow.


	7. Chapter 7 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

*******

"Good morning."

She looked at me, but had nothing to say yet. It was as if the intervening night had made her distrustful of me again. I wondered what a night in this place would be like for a child like her.

"I've been thinking about you. I've got some ideas. I was thinking, what if we go out of the city-"

The effect was instantaneous.

"No!" she shouted, hands balled into fists, eyes round.

"I'm sorry?"

"No!" she was gasping for air, she was that terrified by the concept. "I can't leave the city! I can't go out there!"

"It's ok, you can stay here, no problem. You'll stay right here."

But she curled into a ball and hid for the rest of the session. Eventually, I got tired of waiting, and left.

It seemed we had gone backwards. She wasn't talking to me anymore, she wasn't communicating in any way, she wasn't even acknowledging my presence. But, in one sense, the session had been productive: now I knew that going out of the city was a terrifying prospect for her. Perhaps it was the thought of wild humans. Perhaps she had recently arrived from a conflict zone. I frowned. She was a puzzle alright. I was going to have to think outside the box.

***

When I visited again, she was watching for me.

"I didn't know if you were coming," she said before I'd even sat down, "I… I thought I might have scared you off."

"Well you didn't." I said.

"I'm sorry I yelled at you."

"That's ok. You were upset. I can understand that."

"So it's ok? Me talking to you?" I pressed, "You still want me to come?"

"Yes please. It's not so lonely with you." Her voice was desolate.

"Ok." I said softly, wanting nothing more than to hold her in my arms.

"Well, what are we talking about today?" I said instead.

She thought for a moment, but not as if searching for a topic. More like she was deciding on one. Maybe she'd been thinking up safe topics during the night.

"The weather," she said finally.

"Ok. It's a nice day today, don't you think?"

"Yes, it is a nice day," she said, as if she was reciting language lessons.

"We're lucky, it's been nice for a few days now."

"Yes, that is lucky."

"Still cool in the mornings, but getting almost too hot now."

She was silent, confused. And then I realized she hadn't been outside of the air conditioning in days. She was talking about the weather as she could see it through the widow.

She stiffened as I got up but I kept my movements relaxed. I walked over to the window and opened it, putting my hand outside and soaking my hand in sunlight.

"Don't you think it's hot?" I asked, glancing at her.

She was still crouched on the floor, but watching my hand intently. Centimeter by centimeter, she stood up, sliding her back up the wall, and walked over.

"Yes, that is hot," she said quietly, turning her hand over and over in the sunlight.

We gabbed mindlessly about the weather, and where another child would quickly have been bored, she kept up her side of the conversation, just to have someone to talk to.


	8. Chapter 8 Flame

**Flame**

*******

The house was still, empty, and I walked over the creaking floorboards not bothering to turn on the lights. There was nothing I needed to see here. But a shivering glow spilled out of the bathroom; Bhask had left a candle burning for me, another single flame so I wouldn't feel alone. I gazed at the trembling orange form, letting it draw me back to another time…

The woods were grey and hushed in the pre dawn light, warm even at this hour, and our footsteps echoed loudly in the silence. Alex led me by my hand down the trail, but every time I tried to ask him where he was taking me, he just put his finger to his lips. I walked on behind him in amusement and frustration.

My steps slowed as we approached the turn off for the swimming hole. A little candle burned halfway down the trail, and beyond it, dozens of others surrounded the swimming hole with their warm orange glow. Alex waited at the end of my outstretched fingertips, waiting for me to follow him.

"What is this?" I breathed, not knowing whether to be afraid or enchanted.

"I know you think fire and water don't mix…" he said, his voice incredibly gentle. A skin of mist skimmed over the water's surface. I let him lead me down to the edge. He sat down slowly, watching his submerged feet swinging back and forth, and eventually, I sat beside him, easing my feet in too. I watched the water tensely. He put his arm around me and hugged me close, rubbing my arm.

"You know I'd never let anything happen to you," he breathed into my ear, kissing my cheek. I stiffened, half expecting him to push me in. His arm dropped from around me and he pulled off his t shirt, slipping into the water and pushing out to the middle. I watched him go, longing for him to stay with me, yearning for his touch.

"Come on," he whispered, his eyes fixed on mine. His voice was so sure, and at the same time so gentle. I drew my knees out of the water and pressed my mouth onto them, wanting so badly to be with him, but just incapable of breaking through my fear. He glided back and lifted himself above the surface, one arm on either side of me, resting his forehead on mine and dripping randomly on me. I lifted my face to his and met his kiss, tender and hungry. He was letting me know how badly he wanted me to be with him, and the touch of his lips slowly flooded out the fear strangling my limbs. My legs relaxed back into the water and he followed them, his eyes never leaving mine, his hands shifting to encase my hips. I bent down as he sank, trying to prolong the kiss and delay the inevitable as his lips finally pulled away from mine.

"You coming in? The waters fine," he breathed, drawing out the last syllable alluringly. I smiled softly, trying to find the nerve to join him. He leaned up and touched my lips with his teasingly, but I caught his head and held him to me, pressing my mouth passionately against him. He responded warmly, and I felt my tension melting in his heat. With deliberate slowness, his hands drew me towards the edge, and I let the water climb my legs almost unthinkingly. He paused when I sat right on the lip, and I pushed myself over, slipping down next to him. His arms enfolded me, and he pressed his lips to my neck, my collarbone, my shoulder. My hands cupped his neck tightly, but less with fear than desire. He pushed away from the bank and I wrapped my legs around his hips, barely feeling the water lapping at my neck. The burn of the candles was reflected in a thousand broken images on the surface of the water.

The strident peal of the telephone brought me back to the darkened bathroom. It was Bhask, reminding me to bring Yasha's breakfast to the hospital tomorrow. I packed a bag for her, went to bed, and drowned in loneliness.


	9. Chapter 9 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

*******

The rock floor bit at his bones through the thin mattress, raising him from the darkness. He tried to shift his body onto thicker padding, but heaviness and weakness dragged at his limbs, and his leg throbbed furiously. He clutched at it but a groan escaped despite himself. Hard footsteps brought someone closer.

"You still with us then?" a voice said, and Blackheath struggled to focus on the face, blinking sweat from his eyes. Friend or foe?

"Didn't know if you'd make it, for a while there," she continued, bringing a lantern up to him and checking his leg, firmly removing his clutched hands. He relaxed slightly to see the human dullness rather than the reflective silver of a Soul in her eyes.

"Still bleeding a bit," she frowned. "You'll have to keep still."

He knew better than to ask for No Pain. Soul-free settlements prided themselves on their independence, and Soul products were only traded between trusted friends.

She handed him a bottle of water and he drank deeply, drowning his thirst and fear.

"What is this place?" he asked quietly, dribbling water from the bottle into his hand and wiping his face.

"Griffith," she replied, handing him a rag, "we found you in the truck when we were unpacking. Don't supposed you meant to end up here?"

He shook his head.

"I have to get back," he whispered, pulling his leg to edge of the mattress and grimacing as pain burnt through him, "Where's my gun?"

"Not for a little while yet, buddy," she said, making no move to stop him, or help him, "Or you'll kill yourself trying."

He paused, catching his breath. She watched him as she opened the locked lower drawer of a filing cabinet, and his gun and knives slid into view at the bottom of the drawer.

"For safekeeping. And I'd appreciate it if you kept your mouth shut about it: I don't want visitors in the night." She eyed him until he nodded.

"Give me a knife anyway," he said. She hesitated, but passed him one. He strapped it to his good calf, pulled his pants down over it. This little activity left him wasted and light headed.

"Truck's gone anyway," she continued, refolding her rags. "Won't be back for a month."

_A month_, he thought, panic flooding his blood. _Too long, much too long_…

"I can't wait that long," he muttered, swinging his leg onto the floor and trying to stand.

"You'll have to, or longer, if you don't rest," she said, anger seeping into her voice as she pushed him back down. He lay limply against the wall, sweat coating his skin easily, waiting for the wave of pain to ebb away enough to allow speech.

"Don't be stupid," the woman muttered, pressing a soaking rag to his forehead, "Your life so cheap you can waste it that easy? Haven't you got any family to look after?"

He lay down on his bruised hips again and let exhaustion consume him.

_Family…_


	10. Chapter 10 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

*******

"I know you don't want to go out of the city," I said, "But I was wandering if you'd like to go outside."

"Outside?"

"Outside the building." I wondered for a moment if her father had gone insane and kept her in a basement.

"Just for a little while. Then we would come back."

"Ok."

"Ok?"

"Ok."

I led the way down the corridor and she took my hand lightly but firmly, keeping her body close to mine. At each gate she hid herself partly behind my leg and kept her gaze down as I talked to the clerks. She was still afraid. But as I walked her slowly towards the main entrance, I realized it was not outside that she was afraid of. Her step became eager and her grip tightened in mine not in fear but in excitement. I paused on the main steps but she pulled me on, away from the building. When we had traversed half the park I made her stop.

"Hang on! Where are we going?" I laughed, but I could see instantly that it was the wrong question. She stood still, looking down, and I felt like she was shutting down again.

"Ok; sorry, bad question," I amended, "I didn't mean that anyway. You just seemed in a rush to get somewhere."

"Here," she said, sitting down abruptly on the grass, keeping her gaze averted.

"Here? In the park? Ok," I sat down next to her carefully, wondering what to do to bring her back. "It's nice on the grass. I like it here."

She nodded, picking at the grass like a horse with her fingers.

"Ok, so are we talking here or are we just enjoying the park? I don't mind, but I don't want to be trying to talk to you if you don't want me to."

She leaned her head on one hand and looked over to the right.

"It's ok," she said finally.

"Ok, what are we talking about then?"

She frowned in concentration.

"I don't know."

I looked around the park. It made me think of Sammy, waiting at home. He'd have loved to be in the park.

"What about dogs, do you like dogs?"

"Oh yes!" her eyes were suddenly alive.

"Have you got a dog?"

"No, but I met one called Timmy once, and he was nice!"

"Really? What kind of dog?"

"Ummm, a brown one, with longish fur, but not really long? Like you could out your fingers through it and still see them from the top, but not from the sides."

"He sounds a bit like my dog."

"You have a dog?" the disbelief was plainly evident.

"Yeah I do," I chuckled, "he's called Sam, and he has this ball he loves? He just goes nuts if you throw it for him."

"I really like dogs. Dad said we couldn't have a dog - oh!" she clamped her hands over her mouth. I'd forgotten Dad was a forbidden subject.

"Well, not everyone can have a dog," I went on as if everything was normal. "Not everyone likes dogs. But I don't know, I think they're really cool. Like when they come up to with their tail wagging, and their eyes are all like sparkly with happiness? I love that."

"Yeah I like that too," she said with a quick, anxious smile. I kept talking to give her time to compose herself, telling her all about Sam and what he did all day. By the end of the session, she was talking freely again. Well, as freely as she ever did.

"Well, we'd better get going. Come on, I'll take you back."

She took my hand and stood up slowly, and kept hold of it while we walked back. But her steps grew slower and slower the closer we got to the main entrance.

"You alright, honey?" I asked, pausing with one foot on the stairs.

"Yeah," she whispered, shutting down, and by the time we were back in her ward she was gone again, just an empty shell that looked like a girl.

"Well, I'll see you tomorrow, ok?" I said, but there was no response. I hung on the door for a second, hating to leave her like this, and then left.


	11. Chapter 11 Flame

**Flame**

*******

"She's a real sweetie that one," the nurse said affectionately, watching Ayasha sit ever patiently with her dad. Ayasha stiffened as the nurse passed to check the screens, her hands sinking into the sheets and twisting them into her fists. _Real sweet_, I thought, _just don't try to move her_.

"So long as she gets to be with her Dad, she reckons all's right with the world," I replied wearily. Where had this fatigue come from? I did nothing all day, but I was constantly exhausted.

"Yes, she's funny about that isn't she?" the nurse mused, distracted, making notes, "You know what she did last night?"

I forced myself to sit up straighter and give her my attention. She motioned for me to join her just outside the door.

"She's sitting there as always, then she looks around, making sure no one was watching? Then she leans forward and whispers, real quiet, "Wake up Daddy please, Yaya misses you". That's like the longest sentence I've ever heard her say."

She would have been working on it for hours, knowing she wasn't supposed to annoy her Dad when he was sleeping, building up her courage, waiting for the right time… and all for nothing.

The nurse continued her rounds and I gazed at the snow edging past the windows. It fell in drifts and flurries, whipped into furies by the wind, while inside everything was still.

The snow took me back to a year ago, in northern Siberia. The wind lashed snow into our faces, searing our uncovered cheeks, biting at the tips of our noses, ladening our eyelashes with frost. An argument raged around us equally furiously.

We had come to look into setting up a cultural exchange in the Soul-free zone here. We had set up similar exchanges at home allowing humans to access educational opportunities in Mixed areas that they wouldn't otherwise have access to. They lived with a Soul family, and in return had to host them for a time within the Soul-free zone. Another one of Alex's ways of chipping down the barriers between humans and Souls, of surreptitiously dismantling his hated Soul-free zones.

Alex had a splitting headache as a result of the copious liquid hospitality on the two day train journey from Moscow, and was having difficulty keeping his cool. But maybe that was an advantage during a Russian argument. I kept out of it, walking up and down the platform hugging Ayasha to me, trying to ignore both storms.

I had gathered what the problem was. The train had been checked as soon as it was within the Soul-free zone, and as soon as they had seen me, all hell had broken loose. It seemed Alex hadn't made it clear that his wife was a Soul. I found it very suspicious that he had neglected to be clear on this point. He, of course, couldn't see the problem: who better to have on a discussion tour of human-Soul exchanges? To test the waters? The Moscow humans had had no problem with me, but they were used to living in Mixed cities. But the Northerners were refusing to let us go any further.

Finally they agreed to continue the argument indoors, and I could get a mug of hot chocolate while I waited for the outcome. The server stared at me like she'd never served an alien before. Maybe she hadn't. The Northern Areas had been proficient in their defence against Soul incursion. It must feel like a betrayal to have been tricked into inviting one in.

The station building was immense, an antique from Soviet days, frigid, and largely empty. I let Ayasha run around to warm up, doing rickety figure eights around islands of luggage. I ducked my face behind a trunk and she froze, anticipating a game of peekaboo. We had to make sure she could see the rest of us, otherwise she would just run over crossly and pull us into view. But if you played according to her rules, she'd be amused for hours. She screamed with laughter when I poked my head up again, causing a pause in the heated argument across the way, then held her breath in suspense while I 'hid' again. Finally Alex came over to collect us.

"They're letting us go as far as Murmansk," he said quietly, as I grabbed Ayasha so she didn't scream too close to his hangover, "We'll have to renegotiate with the officials there."

***

Murmansk was a port town laden with concrete apartment blocks and rusting ships. Our hotel was a street away from the water, which surged thick and black at the shore, unfrozen thanks to a stream of warmer water from the south, even in the depths of winter. The winter also meant near perpetual night; only a strange twilight suggested midday.

Our hosts had made us all deerskins for the trip, and despite the continuing dispute over my presence, these were handed over for us to change into, being much warmer than anything the South could produce. Of course, in the South they still had central heating. There was even a tiny set for Yashie. I came out into the hotel lobby with Yashie, interrupting the current round of 'negotiations'.

"Thank you," I said, "They are a perfect fit. Even Yashie's." I got her to do a twirl, to best display her fancy new threads. "Bolshoye spasiba." There was widespread amusement at this, though whether it was my accent or Yashie's stumbling catwalk I couldn't tell. The women gathered round to meet Yashie, our perfect ice breaker, and suddenly a decision seemed to have been made.

"They are letting you stay here in Murmansk," Alex translated.

"And you?"

"I'll continue on with the others, the tour will go ahead."

I nodded, glad that the trip would still be productive, and trying not to burden him with my disappointment.

The women invited me for a banya, and I tried to relax, letting the steamy heat warm my chilled bones and the birch smell lift my spirits. The women were raucous, teasing each other about the men and lining up their sons and brothers as the best husbands for Yashie.

"Yuri would be a perfect husband for her," Vedya said, pinching her cheeks.

"You just want to get rid of him!" Anielka scolded, and the others laughed in agreement. There was a divide in opinion as to whether a local, with prison camp and native heritage, was better or worse than a Southerner. Yashie soaked up all the attention as well as the heat, which the women kindly kept cooler for her. Still, the heat built and built with each ladleful of water on the hot rocks. Then everyone was out the door, pulling us with them. The icy air hit us hard but we were still enveloped in the fever of the banya, and it only felt invigorating. Some of the women rubbed snow onto their bodies, but Vedya motioned me further down with the others. I ran with them til I saw where we were headed. My footsteps slowed as the others splashed into the ocean, shouting, the spray white on the black void of the water spreading to the horizon.

I couldn't do it. My heart beat painfully against the sight and my throat shut down. I stood watching them for a while, then carried Yashie back and sat in the banya, laden with a deep shame that I couldn't conquer my fear.

Vedya came to join me a little later.

"You don't like ocean?" she asked.

"I… I can't swim," I lied pathetically.

"She scared!" Anielka said, her tone dismissive and incriminating at once. It was true, I was scared. But I couldn't face explaining why.

We joined the men for food and vodka, and the women pressed me to join them in a few drinks. I was buzzing slightly when I went upstairs to change Ayasha, noticing the glare of the light fixtures rather than my footing. I left the room door open – I would only be a minute, and sang to Yashie as I changed her, giggling together as I slipped on a fresh nappy.

"Mrs Flame," came a respectful voice from the door, "there is matter for your attention in lobby. Please will you come with us?"

"Of course," I smiled at them, two heavy set lads, and they came closer as I washed my hands.

"Now, please."

"Sure, I'll just-"

"You can leave her here. We won't be long."

"Oh no, she's not used to being alone and-"

The snub muzzle of a gun pressed to my side silenced me. My stomach shrank into a small hard golf ball. The two had become four and the respectful tone evaporated.

"You will come with us now."

I couldn't think. My eyes were latched onto Yash, but they ignored her, guiding me out of the room, the four men surrounding me. Some other guests were coming towards us down the corridor. I tried frantically to think of a way out of this, my heart drumming faster and faster, accompanying my breathing.

"You will be silent," they hissed, shoving the gun deeper into my ribs. I held my breath and the guests noticed nothing as they passed, chatting to each other cheerfully.

We walked through the dimly lit lobby like ghosts, and still raised no one's suspicions. Perhaps it was normal for four thugs to escort a terrified guest out late at night here. My panic grew, wiping my thoughts, as they walked me out into the dark streets. I saw the deeper blackness of the ocean at the end of the road and my steps faltered. My mind blanked completely at the sight of it, fear convulsing my body, my feet freezing to a stop.

They shoved me forward, their goal in sight, and I started screaming, knocking the gun away from my back and trying to run for it, anywhere that was away from the water. But there was a wall of muscle behind me, turning me back, trying to cover my mouth, forcing me back down with vice like hands that held my elbows tight behind me and propelled me forward. I twisted and ripped away from them desperately, but there was always another hand to grab me where the last had slipped. I tried to suck air through the hard hands that silenced me, and kicked out like a maniac at their knees: a man collapsed with a grunt beside me. An attempt to brain me with the gun only managed a glancing blow from my frenzied bucking; anything, anything to keep me away from the water.

My feet kept slipping on the icy shore. I kept shoving them back under me, desperately searching for grip anywhere, but they were stronger. They shoved me relentlessly forward, closer and closer. Then the icy water was snapping at my ankles, and my frantic writhing kicked the salty taste into the air, spraying everything.

Then the vices holding me disappeared; sturdy and lame footsteps running hard into the night. I sank to my knees in the water, sobbing like a madwoman, vaguely aware of other footsteps coming closer. Arms grabbed me and I screamed, but it was Alex dragging me out of the water, sitting me on the dry ground. His arms were tight and safe around my waist, but I couldn't get enough of a grip to do more than sit there, weeping helplessly.

"Your head," he said, and his fingers stung where he pressed them to my forehead, and came away coated in blood. I wanted to tell him I was fine, but could only shake my head. My lungs were useless for anything more than gasping. The others were shouting in a cacophony of Russian around us.

"Let's get you inside, hey," he said quietly, but I cried out when he went to lift me, the others stopped him, shouting and pointing to my shoulder. A tight ache told me I must have struggled so hard I'd dislocated it. He shifted his grasp to my waist and my good arm and helped me back inside the hotel. A doctor had been called and reset my shoulder easily, while Alex Healed the head wound with a minimum of fuss, his jaw furious in the dim light of the lobby, but his eyes staying cool for my sake. And I was as good as new.

***

I sat in the shower, Yashie at my feet , letting the hot water drum down on us, obliterating thought with its erratic rhythm. Yashie was fully occupied trying to fill her cupped hands and pour it over my knees, and I was fully occupied staring at her in the harsh yellow light of the naked bulb.

"I think that's probably enough, hey?" Alex said, turning off the water, and dropping a towel on Yashie as she darted naked through the room. He pulled me up, wrapped me in a towel and then his arms, and sat with me on the bed. I stared at the carpet, feeling his touch but unable to respond.

"How're you doing in there?" he murmured into my ear. I tried to focus, drawing in a long breath.

"I've really stuffed up this trip, haven't I?" I said, my voice too high and tight.

"You haven't done anything," he replied. "I'm just getting really sick of people trying to kill you."

I smiled despite myself, shivering, and he rubbed my arms slowly and methodically. They could have just shot me. They could have strangled me. But they wanted to make a point; they knew I was afraid of the water. They had wanted to do it in a way that terrified me. Well, they had managed that part alright.

"I can't believe we had to stay in the only place in the whole bloody Soul-free zone where the sea never freezes," I said, attempting for a casual laugh but ending with something sounding more like a loon. "If they'd tried to kill me another way I probably would have gone quietly."

Alex kissed the back of my neck gently, his breath hot on my skin.

"Vasily is trying to say it was just a drunken joke," he muttered. I stiffened. That gun was no joke. A dislocated shoulder was no joke. Alex's silence told me he agreed.

"I can't stay here," I whispered, thinking despairingly of being without him.

"I know," he murmured, "But I'm not sending you back on the train alone either."

Yashie came to a stop in front of us, lifting her chin high to see us from beneath the towel that was still draped over her head.

"And we'd better get some clothes on you, before you start sticking to the floor," he said, reluctantly putting me down on the bed and catching her.

"Don't think about it tonight," he said softly, doing an impression of a steam train on her head with the towel while she supplied the engine noises. "We'll deal with it tomorrow."

I nodded, pulling on a tracksuit and crawling under the covers, shutting out the world.

***

I lay in bed awaiting the dawn, having forgotten that dawn wouldn't come for months. Alex came in with breakfast for me, and Yashie pulled the blanket down, wriggling out of my arms.

"Konstantin is going to take you to stay with his family," Alex said as Yashie tucked into my breakfast, "They're corralling their reindeer at the moment so they'll be on the move, in the middle of nowhere, and everyone knows everyone."

"Sounds perfect," I said, getting up and rubbing the bruise in my back where the gun had been shoved.

"You're sure," Alex said, watching me doubtfully as I went to stare through the window at the lamp lit streets, "you seem…"

"I'll be fine when I'm out of this city," I murmured,_ and away from that water_. Inland, to where anything liquid was frozen solid and would be for months.

We dressed in our deerskins and Yuri drove us out to where the dog teams were waiting, stiff with excitement in the crisp dark air, the snow glowing under the starlight.

"Flame, hang on," Alex said, drawing me away from the others. He rested his hands on my shoulders, wincing at the bruise on my forehead, and watched me doubtfully.

"Are you sure you're ok? Yesterday you were really messed up. I think, more messed up than I've ever seen you. But today, you're… you're acting like you're fine."

"Ok then, I'm not fine. Yesterday… I had a _really _bad night," I gave a short, bitter laugh, "But I'm ok, and I'm getting out of here. I know I will be fine, and I can cope with that. I just… couldn't cope, yesterday."

His eyes searched mine, but I was anxious to get going and slipped from his touch.

The dogs pulled us swiftly over the snow, a deep soft highway over hard frozen bogs, rivers, and lakes, towards the corralling camp. Alex followed in our tracks two weeks later.

The dogs warned us of their arrival minutes before they could be seen. We edged out of the tents and watched the sleds approach, skirting around the forest edge.

I felt a different person than the tense stranger that hauled herself off the sledge two weeks ago, tripping in the deep snow. Now, I had found a place amongst a group of people who had treated me like one of their own. They knew, of course, what had happened in Murmansk; I could see the revulsion of it, and their sympathy for me in their eyes. But they spoke nothing of it, keeping to day to day affairs of corralling and marking the deer, for which I was deeply thankful. Here, I could forget I was an alien invader. Here, I could just be a city cousin learning the ropes, providing amusement for everyone when I mispronounced words or couldn't hold a reindeer. They held me within their circle with warm hearts but gave me space to start to breathe again too, so that by the time Alex arrived I felt the knots within me had unwound and lay slack.

Alex was running behind the sled where the trail was firmer, but whereas the dogs were pulled up and tied a little away from the camp, he didn't stop til he had his arms around me.

"Daddy!" Yashie shouted, jumping and reaching beside him, trying to get him to lift her up, and when that failed, wrapping herself around his leg.

"Hey you," he said tenderly, his face close, "How's the deer herding going?"

"Oh, pretty good," I managed, a little breathless with joy.

"Better now we've come to help?"

I chuckled.

"You've come just in time. We've already done all the hard work."

"Oh I see. Well, perhaps we're not needed." He called out to the others, walking back to the sleds with Ayasha like an oversized boot on one leg and me hanging off his other arm.

"You're not going anywhere, mister," I said, trying to sound stern, but becoming rapidly infected with Ayash'a giggling.

"Well, turns out the dogs need a break anyway," he said, stopping so I could better slip my arms around him, "Lucky you."

I gazed into his wonderful face.

"Lucky me."

***

Ilne served out the evening meal into her enamel dishes, passing them to the group collected in the tent against the desolate snowstorm beyond. The temperature dropped by ten degrees instantly as Vasily came in from outside, stamping the snow off his boots and sealing the door behind him.

"How did the trip go, then?" I asked Alex, maneuvering a bowl to him passed Yashie's grasping fingers, "Any trouble?"

"Not a whisper. Everyone was very hospitable. Too hospitable."

"Oh dear," I grinned, thinking of the train trip.

"If I never have to drink to another 'Za druzhbu myezhdu narodami!'-"

But at this a shout went up and the vodka bottles materialised instantly.

"Oh god…" Alex moaned, but dutifully raised his glass.

"My liver is going to need an extended holiday when we get home," he muttered. I drank the first toast then surreptitiously passed the others to Alex, who looked at me with murderous eyes but drained them anyway, grimacing discretely. "I don't know about this exchange business though. The Souls would never cope with this amount of alcohol."

"We could put them into training before they went."

"Yeah, pre-damage their livers, that's a great idea. Maybe that's the whole idea, get rid of the Souls by luring them up to the arctic and drinking them to death. Oh, but Flame, you should see the hardware they've got up here. Blackheath would be in heaven."

"You mean guns?"

"Guns, mortars, surface to air missiles… all the stockpiles were up here from before the invasion. Sure helped them keep the Souls out."

Yuri grabbed his shoulder and launched off into a long retelling of some particularly amusing incident in Russian, and I settled back to enjoy the atmosphere. Vasily leant behind Alex to talk to me without breaking the flow of the story.

"Syarda would like to show you something," he said.

Syarda was always the first to try to teach me something new. She had an insatiable appetite for teaching, and I felt fortunate that she had the patience to work with me. Her tent was a little way away, and though the storm was raging outside, all the tents were connected by blizz lines, thin ropes that guided you from sanctuary to sanctuary.

I pulled on my parka and stepped out, feeling the taut rope bounding in the gusts of wind in one hand, closing the door behind me with the other, sealing in the warmth of the tent from the arctic night. The wind was ferocious, grabbing at my legs, tearing at my clothing, alternately attacking my lungs and fighting against my breath. But the deerskins were beautifully warm and the lifeline running through my gloved fingers would lead me straight to Syarda's tent.

But then the rope felt wrong in my hands. There was a slackness in it not caused by the hurl and suck of the wind. I crept my fingers along it and came to the end of the line, spasming uselessly in the air. I turned and ran my fingers back along the line, and it's evil twin, the other end of the rope, lay limp in my gloves.

The snow whirled mindlessly around me, filling the seamless world with noise and sight, white above, white below, and all around me, white. Fear chilled me to the core. I was lost without bearings in a trackless world. But I knew enough not to panic: I only had to keep the wind on my opposite side to retrace my steps to the tent. So I walked back, twenty, forty, sixty steps, counting breathlessly to impose order on the maelstrom. But my world remained unchanged, no tell tale shadows or fogs of light to denote a tent or cabin, no lumps in the snow indicating a lost boot, buried firewood, or a dog. Nothing to say I had gone anywhere at all. Had I not got the angle right? Had the wind direction changed? Now I could be anywhere.

The few seconds it took to realize this, made me know too that I had to keep walking: the cold stole into my muscles and stiffened my joints. Equally chilling was the thought of walking off blindly into the storm. So I walked around in a small circle, and my feet could feel the ruts and valleys of my own footsteps retraced. And though I thought by this to minimize drift, a stubbed toe told me I had travelled. My hands felt along the length of the structure before the image could form in my mind. It was the corral! Suddenly I had been plucked from nothingness and located very firmly _somewhere_. I clung to it in relief, grinning blindly into the dark whiteness, and the cold dug its finger deeper into me still. I knew I could not try to find the tents again. They were not far, but may as well have been in another universe in the storm. So I kept walking, ten steps along the fence, and ten steps back. Back and forth, back and forth, with the wind constantly buffeting me against the wood, my teeth clacking so hard they ached. And little by little, the infinite strength of the storm fought and won over the limited strength of my body, and soon I was walking so slowly that the cold captured me completely.

I squatted, stiff, huddling around my own small body heat, giving up as less as possible to the wind, but it was content with freezing my back and my feet. I sacrificed them to keep warmth around my heart, my hands, and my face. And slowly, a mound of snow built up behind me and cut out the wind. I thought sluggishly I should have done this myself earlier, as I relaxed into the snowbank that released me from the endless struggle with the shoving wind. Even my shuddering shivering calmed. I had seen the dogs sleep cosily beneath the snow, and felt a cool slumber descend on my limbs. A heaviness dragged at my consciousness, and I was tempted to sleep, but an image of Alex provoked me. "You don't think!" he was yelling at me, "What about us?"

_What about you_? I thought fuzzily, annoyed that he was yelling at me when I was so tired. Images of Ayasha and Bhask pierced my fatigue, and I considered them, uncertain, as the rest of mind collapsed around them. Just a little sleep… why couldn't they grant me that? But the images… my mind could not let go of them: Alex, Bhask, Ayasha… I was playing hide and seek with them in the snow. I could hear them calling for me. Ayasha found me first, small and warm in the biting snow, and I pulled her down beside me, fingers to my lips.

"Sh!" I whispered, holding her close, her deerskins long and shaggy, but she would not stay still. And as she squirmed away I put my head down on my hands and closed my eyes at last.

***

I was woken by a burning in my fingers. Someone was holding a red hot needle to them, only the sensation grew, like they were using a nail now, and then a poker. I tried to pull my hands away but someone held them tightly by the wrists. Another fumbled at my face, trying to open my lips, and I pushed my face into my shoulder desperately to keep it from them.

"Flame?" I heard Alex say, "Flame?" I twisted and pulled at my wrists but they were held firm, hard against the searing poker.

"Make them stop!" I sobbed, and the hands pulling at my face drew away. I turned to look at him, distraught, as my fingers were burning still. Then I saw that it was him that held my wrists so tight. My fingers were slowly ballooning out into little purple sausages.

"Alex, let go!" I wailed. How could he torture me like this?

"You've got frostbite Flame, that's why it hurts. We're trying to give you No Pain. Just open your mouth."

I tried to focus on him through the tears and the pain. He wouldn't lie to me. I had to trust him. I opened my mouth slowly, keeping my eyes on him, and someone gave me a wafer of No Pain. As it dissolved on my tongue I felt the fire start to be extinguished, and Alex's grip on my wrists gentled as I calmed. Gradually, I could take in the rest of my surroundings: Konstantin's tent, I could see Yuri, Alex, Konstantin... But it did not feel like Konstantin's tent; his tent was warm, and this one was icy. I was shivering ceaselessly, convulsively, and Alex drew me back into his lap.

"I'm so cold," I murmured, and the others were only in their undermost, softest deerskins, pulling off my boots, "it's freezing in here, aren't you cold?" Alex pressed his arms along mine and folded them into me, cradling my hands, his chest cupping my back. He felt like a furnace.

"Are you sick?" I asked him faintly, tired again now the pain had disappeared, turning and resting my head on his shoulder, "You've got some fever happening there." He kissed my forehead, pressing his cheek to mine.

"Oh, your feet, Flame…"

"They feel fine," I muttered, glancing at them. They didn't look fine though. They looked dead and the toes rotten. I gazed at them, puzzled.

"They're not my feet," I assured Alex, snuggling back into him, trying to holding the shivering still, "Mine feel fine. Where's Yashie?"

"Flame, can you feel your feet?" he asked, his voice that quiet tone that told me he was very serious.

"Um," I frowned, sorting through my jumbled head for the location of my feet, "Feet… Not really… No."

"My hands feel much better now though," I offered instead, but he didn't let go of them.

"Alright. You go back to sleep now," he whispered. _Bossy_, I thought, but drifted off anyway.

***

When I woke up next, Alex's arms were around me still, we were lying on layers of cosy skins. I eased my wrists out of his grasp and examined my fingers, flexing and stretching them slowly. They didn't look so bad. I tried to look at my feet and woke him, his arms tightening around me.

"Hey," he whispered, lazy with weariness, "you're up." His hands searched out my wrists and clamped them automatically.

"Easy tiger, my hands are fine," I whispered back. He looked amused.

"They're fine now," he said, pulling me into a sitting position and lifting a little husk off the floor. It was a perfect cast of the tip of my finger, the skin sloughed off entirely.

"The Heal sped up the healing process. I could have had a whole set, but the dogs ate the others."

"Oh," I whispered, "Guess they were pretty bad then, huh?"

"Not as bad as your feet,' he said grimly. My feet were elevated on a roll of furs, but were covered in bandages so I couldn't see the damage.

"Not good, huh?" I said, feeling the colour drain out my face at the possibilities but not finding the courage to ask.

"The Heal threw your toenails off, but it hasn't got around to growing them back yet. It might take awhile."

"Bugger."

"Then there's your back, your face… Anyway, you'll be fine, and that what counts, hey?"

I had the feeling he was reproaching me, but couldn't be bothered to figure out why.

"Yashie?"

"She's staying with Syarda, I'll go get her." He went to get up.

"Hang on," I said, catching at his arm.

"What?"

"I missed you," I whispered, wrapping my arms around him and squeezing his familiar warmth.

"Missed you too," he said softly, holding me tight. It was heaven to have him hold me…

"Flame?" the nurse asked, and I glanced at her startled. The hospital… Alex… My heart seized up and I covered his hands in mine, holding my breath to hold in the tears. I was so sick of crying.

"We're going to do his physio…?" the nurse said.

"Oh, I'm sorry," I murmured, getting out of their way. Yashie was sleeping so I could gently move her away, praying she didn't wake up before they were done. She started to fidget just as they finished up, and I hurriedly put her back beside him to avoid any screaming. She squirmed her way up between his arm and his body, and drifted back to sleep with his shoulder for a pillow, arm flung over his chest. She looked so comfortable, so secure in her Daddy's arms.

I picked up his hand. So warm, despite its stillness. Like he had a fire constantly burning within. I laid the length of my cheek into his palm, holding his hand against my face so it wouldn't fall away, willing him to draw life from me and wake.

The snow continued to fall outside, giving no measure to the passing of time, as if it would fall forever, and always had.


	12. Chapter 12 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

*******

I ran in through the pouring rain, holding onto my trench coat tight and bursting into the building.

"Careful, there, it's slippery today," the clerk said. I smiled at him and made my way through the first two gates. She was standing at the third gate, waiting for me.

"It's raining," she said forlornly as I came in, "we can't go outside today."

"I know, and I thought how sad Sammy would be cooped up inside all day, and then I thought we'd be cooped up to, so I figured we may as well be cooped up together!"

I opened my trenchcoat and let go of Sammy, who dropped to the floor and promptly stood up on his hind legs, resting his paws lightly on my arm and wagged his tail, like he was expecting applause.

"You brought your dog here?" she asked in wonder, running her hands through his damp fur. Sammy turned to licked her cheek in acknowledgement, but kept his gaze on me, watching intently. I knew what he wanted.

"I even brought his ball!" I whispered, drawing it slowly out of my pocket. Sammy went entirely still, all his attention focused on it. I rolled it down the corridor for him and he sprinted after it madly, Pouncing on it and running back grinning, chin high, the caught ball on show.

"You want to throw it for him?" I asked her, and she nodded in delight. "Hold out your hand and tell him to drop it."

"Drop!" she said sternly, and he dropped it immediately into her outstretched hand. She didn't even flinch at the slimyness.

"Go on then," I said, taking off my coat and folding it up.

They played for hours. I knew Sammy was inexhaustible, but I wondered at the girl's fascination with such a simple repetitive game. Was she that starved for companionship she didn't care what she did? Or did she just really like dogs? Sammy was easy to love, but his ball mania soon made most people steer clear of him. Maybe her behavior wasn't a result of her abandonment. Maybe she'd been weird to begin with…

It was dark by the time I noticed the time.

"Oh man, you'll be later for dinner! I should let you go. Come on, Sam." But Sam didn't move, just sat happily by her side, leaning on her ever so slightly, and watched me, panting. The girl twined her fingers through his fur as if memorizing the feel of him.

"Sam?" I called, and Sam pricked his pointy ears, but moved no other muscles towards me. He'd found a friend, and had yet to be convinced I had anything better to offer.

"Alright, you're going to stay here the night are you?" I asked him, amused, but the girl spun to look at me, her face suffused with hope.

"Oh can he? Please? Can he?"

"Well…"

The girl and the dog looked at me with shining eyes.

"I guess I don't see why not. You have to let him pee before bed and bring him something from dinner, and make sure he doesn't annoy anyone."

She grinned at me.

"Ok!"

"Alright then, I'll see you tomorrow." The girl stood up and Sam immediately jumped on her bed, making himself at home. I laughed and waved goodbye, almost running into the head of child psychiatry in the corridor.

"Ah, just the man I wanted to see."

"That your dog in there? I don't believe we cater for canines."

"He booked himself in. Obsessive compulsive ball issues."

"I see."

"I wanted to talk to you about that girl."

"You are making amazing progress. I wouldn't recognize the girl that came in a week ago."

"Each day we make some progress, but each night she slides back again. I don't think this environment is helpful in her case."

"She's a special case alright."

"I want to try taking her home with me, see how that goes."

"You're sure about that?"

"Like you said, she's a special case. I don't want her sitting around here the rest of her life. I think we've got a better chance of finding her family this way. She really opens up when she's away from here."

"And I guess I either agree to that, or agree to take on your dog."

"Something like that, yeah," I grinned.

"You drive a hard bargain, Miss Charlotte."

"Thanks. I'll keep you in the loop."

"Sure you will. Goodnight."

"Good night."


	13. Chapter 13 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

*******

He was woken by noisy scuffling as two men carried in an inert form, the woman following close behind, holding up a glass jar that tubed fluids into the unconscious arm.

"Put him down there, guys," she said softly.

Blackheath's hand slid instinctively to his calf at the sight of strangers, to the comforting lines of his knife, but they ignored him, and the tension passed.

"Do you think he's going to make it, Jiu?" one said, sitting and catching his breath while the woman drenched the unconscious man's clothes in water and opened out his arms and legs.

"What's happened?" Blackheath asked, taking in the patient's slack red face and purple stains beneath his eyes.

"Bushwalker," she muttered, "Heatstroke." Blackheath shifted closer carefully and took a rag to mop at the man's face.

"Anything we can do, Giulia?" the other asked. Giulia grimaced, setting up another drip set into the patient's other arm.

"Identify his next of kin?" she muttered, and the other two exchanged guarded glances and left.

Blackheath discovered they made their own fluids, sterilising jars in steam, boiling up water, salt and sugars in strict quantities, sealing and letting them cool. Giulia kept at it all day while Blackheath rhythmically soaked the man's body, trying to draw the heat away. As night came the patient regained a level of consciousness, muttering and jerking erratically.

"That a good sign?" Blackheath asked. Giulia shrugged.

"His insides are probably cooked. His brain might recover a little but his body's shutting down."

Blackheath knew he needed specialist medical attention. But there was no way to do that here, the humans had severed all contact with Soul areas, apart from occasional supply trucks. And the only hospitals were in Soul areas. The man would die. Blackheath leaned back, stretching his aching leg.

"Then why the hell are we doing this?" he growled in frustration, throwing the rag on the ground.

"Just in case," Guilia whispered wearily, "Sometimes, a tourist comes through with a car, sometimes the truck comes early…" she shrugged, "we have to try, just in case. Like with you."

Blackheath looked at her, surprised.

"You didn't look like you'd make it either for a while there. But you pulled through."

"I've got something to live for," Blackheath muttered, fighting the useless urge to get up and run for the city, anything to be closer to finding her. Sitting here was killing him. Not knowing…

"Maybe so does he," Giulia said softly.

Blackheath slowly picked up the rag and began the methodic rounds of mopping again.

***

He was woken up by the clink of glass on glass. Giulia was packing away the fluid jars. He sat up slowly, rubbing at his leg; he must have dozed off.

"He's dead," Giulia said, sitting back, defeat allowing her to give in to her exhaustion, her eyes dull in the lantern light. Blackheath glanced at the inert form, no emotion on his face.

"Let's see his wallet," Blackheath said curtly, tugging it free. "Jack Rankine," he read, "He's Mixed status."

"Good riddance then," Giulia whispered, eyes closed, but he felt her anger was mostly directed at herself. He pushed himself up and limped gingerly over. He sat next to her, leaning forward, careful not to touch her.

"You did your best, you know. More than anyone else would do."

"Yeah, well it wasn't good enough was it."

"It was good enough for me."

Her eyes held his in the warm, flickering lamp light, like she wanted to believe him. Then she looked away, and her face was lost to the darkness.


	14. Chapter 14 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

*******

The sun was streaming through the clouds when I came back, and I wondered how the night had gone.

There was no small figure waiting for me by the gate. I went on to her ward.

"Hello Charlotte!" she called, happily brushing Sammy on her bed. Sammy gave me a flip of the tail, but was too settled to get up and say hello properly.

"You have a good night?"

"Yup."

"That's great." The brushing continued unabated, girl and dog both content.

"So I've got an idea for you. Don't worry if you don't like it, I won't be mad."

She looked at me, some of the old tension stiffening her limbs. Sammy nudged her and she buried her hands in his fur.

"See, it's the weekend tomorrow, and I don't usually come into work on the weekends, unless they need me to. So I was wandering if you wanted to spend the weekend at my place."

"Your house?"

"Yeah."

"With Sammy?"

"Of course. It's his house too."

"I'd like that."

"Good. Me too. Alright, I got you these back, but we'll go to the shops and get you some more" I tossed her t shirt and jeans on her bed and watched her eyes light up.

"I'm gonna take Sammy for a pee while you get changed, ok?"

The dog ran madly from tree to tree, trying to decide on the best possible place for his liquid message. I wondered what I was going to do with this girl. No family, no history, no name… well at least she had a voice. That was a start.

I had told her a weekend, but only because I didn't want her to think this was forever. Truthfully, I doubted I would be bringing her back here. Emotionally, she needed to be back with her father. Surely he was looking for her, too? But I didn't even know where to start. And I knew I couldn't press her on it. We'd just have to take it slow.


	15. Chapter 15 Flame

**Flame**

*******

Bhask sat with us for a little while before he went off to work.

"How long do you think she'll keep this up?" he asked, watching Ayasha endlessly humming, picking at the blanket.

"Who knows, with her? I would have thought she'd be thoroughly bored by now. But she doesn't even seem to notice how long she's been here."

"I don't know," Bhask replied, in a way that implied he disagreed. I looked at him and he sat forward, coming clean.

"You know what she did last night? She's sitting there as always, then she looks around, making sure no one was watching? Then she leans forward real slow, reaches out and pinches up his eyelids, one at a time."

" 'Where's daddy?' " I sighed, rubbing my forehead.

"Yeah, she was looking for him alright," Bhasks voice was taut with hurting.

I sat down beside her and rubbed her back gently. She beamed me a happy smile and went back to counting the tiny squares in the woven blanket.

"What goes on in that little head of yours?" I wondered aloud.

The breakfast trolley rattled past, drawing me back to the train journey back from Murmansk. Alex watched the forests stream past the window, and I practiced walking.

_It was so totally Alex_, I thought, _deciding I didn't need to know I'd lost a part of my anatomy_. I had discovered one of my little toes had fallen off from the frostbite before anyone had quite got around to telling me, and it was surprising how difficult it was to walk without the steadying influence of toenails and a toe.

Alex was thoroughly absorbed by the unchanging view, and had been for hours. It was hard to give him the silent treatment when he was ignoring you.

"Alright, enough," I said, dropping onto the opposite bunk in irritation. "Talk to me."

He pulled his gaze off the middle distance and settled it on me, his eyes troubled but his mouth silent.

"Come on, Alex! We've got another whole day and a half of this. Tell me what you were thinking about."

"You don't want to know," he said softly, his voice containing a hint of a warning note. I lay on my back and shoved my fingers into the springs of the mattress above. _Oh right, that's why I asked_, I thought, but looked for a more fruitful reply.

"Planning revenge on Vasily?" I guessed.

"Aah… no. That's… kind of, already taken care of."

I sat up to look at him: his tone was still guarded. What wasn't he telling me? He met my eyes briefly then looked away.

"Normally, under the zone regulations, he would have been killed. But… as you're a soul… they weren't sure if that applied so… I had to decide on his punishment."

_Oh no_… Alex got to decide the punishment for someone who'd tried to kill me? This wasn't good.

"You couldn't just let him go?"

"Ah…. No."

"So?" It was like pulling teeth.

"You really want to know?"

I just stared at him balefully, and he went on.

"I figured I'd kind of, do to him… what he did to you. Without all the freezing."

_Shit._

"Flame…? Are you alright? You're looking kind of pale…?"

I was feeling distinctly sick.

"Ah, it's just that… I don't have any toenails just at the moment."

He shook his head, amused, and I started to feel relieved.

"No, I didn't pull out his toenails. Yours will grow back. I just cut off his toe."

"Just…?"

"It was really very quick."

"Oh my god…"

I reached for the bin and retched.

"You cut off his toe?" I said finally, my voice echoing inside the vile smells of the bin.

"Well," he said, shoving himself tighter into his corner, "what would you have done?"

"God, I don't know. I'm not really very good with this whole crime and punishment concept."

But Alex wasn't letting me off that easy. Not while I still hovered anxiously near the bin.

"Uh… cold storage?"

"A: Soul-free zone. No cold storage facilities and B : he supports his family, what are they going to do while he's gone?"

"Alright then… I don't know… Called Dorsey?"

"Not me?" he said, looking hurt.

"I already know what you would say: cut off his frikkin toe!"

He stared back at me.

"Ok, fine… Yelled at him?"

"You really think Vasily is going to be scared of me yelling at him?"

"If he's human he _should_ fear for his life."

"He's not human. Trust me."

"Couldn't they just, send him away? Not have anything to do with him?"

"Up there, that's a death sentence anyway. Just slower."

I was giving up. I couldn't tell him what he should've done, and my conceptions of right and wrong were getting blurred.

"But jeez, Alex… Did you use the No Pain at least?"


	16. Chapter 16 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

*******

"That'll be your room in there. Let me know if you need anything?"

She nodded, standing in the middle of the room shyly. Sammy jumped straight onto the bed and stood there, wagging his tail watchfully, daring her to tell him off or join him. I left them to go check the fridge.

"You like ham? We could have ham sandwiches for lunch," I asked, but there was no reply, "Either that or peanut butter. Otherwise we'll have to go the shops…"

She was standing in the middle of the room, exactly where I'd left her, gazing around, wide eyed and quiet. _Ok, no shops today_, I thought. This was obviously overwhelming enough. I tried to look at the room as she would see it. A single bed, a sedate adult sheet set, but livened up with some soft toys. A bookcase filled with my old ratty childhood favourites, some toys, a jar of textas, an ipod and speakers. A desk and a bedside table, matching lamps, a chair. A wardrobe, straight out of Narnia. A window with curtains tied to the side. A woven rug covering the floorboards. Nothing scary that I could see. Certainly a lot homier than the ward. Was it too different? Surely not after only a week.

"You alright?" I asked gently.

"This is my room?" she whispered.

"Uh huh."

She looked around some more, her gaze resting on each thing, like she'd never seen them before.

"My room's up here," I offered, leading the way. She poked her head in the door, taking in the queen bed, clothes thrown over the reading chair, paintings on the walls, fireplace, mantelpiece covered in trash and treasure.

"You stay here a lot?" she asked.

"Well… every night," I replied, puzzled, "and I've lived here since I was implanted." Was it strange to her to stay in the one place for so long?

She backed away slowly, shifting her gaze to the corridor.

"Does Sammy sleep with you?" she asked softly.

"Sammy sleeps where he wants. I daresay he'll sleep with you."

A small smile escaped her lips.

I settled on the lounge with a book and some music, and let her explore the rest of the house at her own pace. She walked absolutely silently, only the click of Sammy's nails following her on the floorboards signaling her slow progress. She spent a long time gazing at the bathroom, and I had a presentiment of trouble in that direction when it came to bath time tonight.

Sure enough, when the time came, she stood uncertainly right in the middle of the room. I was coming to recognize it as her favourite position in any new room. You could keep an eye on everything that way.

"Do you want a bath or a shower?" I prompted, keeping my tone light.

"A bath," she said after an age. I ran the taps for her and decided against bubble bath tonight. I just couldn't tell with her, the smallest things seemed to completely overwhelm her. But I couldn't piece together rhyme or reason to her reactions.

The bath filled, she just continued to stand there, looking at it.

"I can swim," she said, as if convincing herself as well as me, "Daddy taught me."

"Well, that's great," I said, bemused, "But you don't need to swim. It's not that deep." I considered my bath afresh. Was it really that big? Maybe it looked big to a small child. How big was her bath?

She climbed in carefully, not bothering to take her clothes off first.

"Oooh, it's so warm," she chuckled, her eyes shining with delight. I handed her the soap and she took it gently, then held it to her nose, smelling it lengthily.

"No good? I've got another one…"

She shook her head instantly, keeping her nose pressed to the bar. I took it that she liked that one.

I left her to it, scrounging around for a t-shirt she could wear to bed that wouldn't fall off her. When she came out of the bathroom, it hung precariously on the tips of her shoulders, just waiting for Sammy to brush pass for it to slip. I squashed my amusement and followed her to her room to tuck her in.

"Charlotte?"

"Mm hmm?"

"Do I have to go back on Monday?"

"No, not if you don't want to."

"Daddy said I shouldn't go there. I didn't want to go there but they made me."

"Oh honey. They just wanted to keep you safe."

She stared at her intertwined fingers.

"Daddy said they wouldn't give me back," she breathed, so quiet I almost missed it. I rubbed her arm.

"Little girls belong with their Daddies," I whispered, smiling confidently at her. She returned a small, hopeful smile.

"Don't worry, we'll find him," I said, kissing her head. She smile vanished and she curled up tight in the bed, tensed. I sat with her for a moment, but she didn't relax, so I rubbed her arm once more and let her be, turning off the room light and leaving on the night light.

Daddy was definitely human then, I thought as I pulled her carefully wrung out clothes off the towel rail and threw them in the drier. Daddy was afraid the Souls would take his daughter; Souls wouldn't be afraid of that.

I heard a thump and creak as Sammy must have jumped onto the bed. I pictured him curling up to her, back to back, two quiet lives taking comfort from each other, and went to finish my book.


	17. Chapter 17 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

*******

"Give it a rest," Giulia said, lugging in a water container. Blackheath continued pacing up and down the stone room, using his whole torso to pull his bad leg along.

"What's so important you've got to kill yourself getting out of here for?" she asked, sitting down to fill the water jug while she watched him. He didn't reply, just concentrated on moving his leg, forcing the muscle to stretch and work through the pain.

"You're making the floor sweaty. That's a trip hazard, you know. OH&S."

He sat down next to her heavily, leaning on the wall to catch his breath. She threw him a rag and he dragged it over his face while she poured him some water.

"Come on, let's have a look." She tugged off his jeans, peeled back the bandages and examined the reddened, swollen scab where she'd cut to remove the bullet, and the seeping drainage holes she'd punched to leach out the infection. Blackheath thought of Bhaskar's leg, and how this woman's skills could have made a big difference.

"Well, you're squeezing the infection out any rate," she noted, cleaning it up and re bandaging. Her hands rested on his thigh.

"I bet it's a girl," she said thoughtfully, and he stiffened.

"It is, isn't it?" she said, her voice harder somehow, "You're dying to get back to a girl, aren't you?"

He brushed her hands off roughly and pulled on his jeans. It was none of her business. She watched him for a moment, her face closed, then left.

He rolled onto his side scowling. She probably thought he was after some Soul floozie, shut up in her ivory tower in the Soul cities. If only she knew. Nothing could be further from the truth.


	18. Chapter 18 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

*******

I knocked on the door softly but she was already awake. I carried the tray over and balanced it on the edge of the bed.

"Morning, honey."

"What's this?"

"Breakfast."

"'I'm not sick," she narrowed her eyes at the toast like it was some kind of medicine.

"No, it's just for fun," I chuckled, taking a slice for myself.

Her concept of fun seemed poorly developed. She reached for some toast and I saw a black mark on her shoulder.

"What's that?" I asked, and pulled the sleeve up to reveal a tattoo of a small black cat.

"A cat. Same as Mum's. I've always had it," she replied, twisting round to admire it.

What mother would tattoo her own child? And as a baby? What mother feared enough to need a permanent mark to identify her? But as it had turned out, hers fears had been realized.

"Mum! What about Mummy? Do you know where she is?" How could I have missed this?

"She left when I was little," she shrugged, reaching for more toast.

"Left?" I repeated, cautious, "Do you mean... she died?"

The toast drooped in her fingers, then dropped, unnoticed, as she stared at me, heartbroken.

"Ok, no, right: she left," I amended quickly, "Just wanted to be sure."

She prised the dropped toast off the doona and put it back on the plate.

"She missed her family. She went to go see them," she said softly.

Maybe her family were Souls. Maybe that's why her father had come here, looking for her mother.

"Can we find her?" I asked.

She shook her head, staring at the floor.

"She left years ago."

"No. Ok. Back to Daddy then."

Years ago? The girl would have been too young to remember, surely… But maybe it only felt like years.

"Where would we look for him? How can we find him?"

But she had done with talking for the moment. I would have to continue my investigation by myself. I was lost in thought as I pulled the buttery doona cover off the bed and stuffed it into the washing machine, and gave her clothes another spin in the drier to warm up.

She'd been abandoned by her mother. No sign of her coming back. And her father…

Maybe her father had abandoned her too. I had seen this before. Well, the parents hadn't actually abandoned the child. They'd been taken, and had returned as soon as they were implanted. But the child froze up. He never reconnected with his parents. They even tried implanting him with his Comforter. It had sound fine in theory, direct contact between patient and physician. But the child had just shut down. I had been afraid of that when I had first met this one. Every step she took away from that end buoyed me, and every step back spliced my heart with fear.

I pulled her warmed pants and top out of the drier and dropped them on her bed. She held them to her chest, delighting in the warmth.

"Sammy needs a walk," I said, "You coming?"

She looked at me, surprised.

"I might be seen," she said, uncertainly.

"Yeah, and?"

She had no reply. That basement theory was looking better all the time.

"Come on, we'll go together."

***

Dog walked, next item on the agenda was clothes. I took her to a smaller place, women's and kids clothing, handmade. I knew she was easily overwhelmed, and was hoping this place wouldn't be too much. But it turned out that I was the one more affected by the experience.

She trailed about the racks, choosing as if her life depended on it. I waited, letting her wander. Another customer came in, a Seeker, and she stilled at the sight, easing behind a mannequin. But lots of humans still had this reaction to Seekers, a residue of historical misunderstandings. Finally she chose a few things to try on and disappeared into the changing booth. The Seeker took the booth next to her.

She came out slowly, wearing a new pants and top combination, remarkably similar to the old, and carrying the Seekers gun. She carried it like she knew what it was too, both hands confident on the grip, index fingers flat along the trigger guard, thumbs hovering around the safety. My heart just about collapsed.

"_Oh_ geez! Where the hell did you get that?"

"She kicked into mine when she was changing," she said, looking at the other customers thoughtfully. The partition between the changing rooms didn't reach the floor.

"Shit," I whispered, pressing my palms into my cheeks, waiting for my heart to steady itself.

She glanced at me with delight at my swearing. Delight because it was novel, or familiar?

"It's not loaded," she told me, like this was reassuring.

"Oh great. Isn't that nice." I knocked on the change room door anxiously.

"I won't be a minute!"

"Yeah, uh, we don't want the change room, it's just that we found something you might have misplaced?"

There was a puzzled silence.

"Like your gun?"

"Oh!"

The door opened instantly and she handed back the gun without a word.


	19. Chapter 19 Flame

**Flame**

*******

Bhask came in and flopped in a chair.

"Hi," he muttered.

"Bad day?"

He shook his head, curling up awkwardly in the chair. I waited.

"This is going to sound bad? But I'm so sick of this," he said. "What if he never wakes up?"

"Bhask, sh-" I looked for Ayasha on Alex's bed, but she wasn't there.

"Did you see where Yash went?"

He indicated vaguely in the direction of the door.

"Went to the loo, I spose."

I gave him a long hug, wishing I could fix it.

"I better go get her. He can't stay like this forever, Bhask."

He turned away.

"See ya," he muttered.

Ayasha was waiting at the lift.

"Hey Yashie," I said carefully; she'd never been at the lift before. Was she finally sick of waiting too?

"You coming home with me?"

She nodded, eyes focused somewhere else. I watched her for a second, wandering where she was. Then I pressed the lift button.

***

She followed me into the house like a lamb. Where was the shrieking biting devil child of the other week? I dumped my bag and shoved some food in the microwave, listening to Dorsey on the answering machine. It was an old message, months old now, but I kept it to listen to her voice.

"I just heard about Alex. I guess you're at the hospital... I'll meet you there."

She had never made it; the snow too deep, too quick. She was stranded til the snow melted.

My eyes had rested on a neat pile of objects on a kitchen shelf. A shirt, jacket, pants, some maps, all neatly folded, boots, a wallet, and a brown paper bag of lollies. The personal effects that had come with Alex's body, and had for some reason stayed on a shelf in the kitchen ever since. Probably where I'd shoved it as soon as I got in the door, so I didn't have to think about what to do with it. The rest of his stuff had come later, and sat in the garage in boxes still. Everything was in limbo.

Ayasha was digging around in the closet, and came into the kitchen holding up her deflated beach ball like a triumphant gladiator.

"Ball," she said with satisfaction just about bursting from her.

"That's great," I said, completely lost. It was a ball. At least, it was when it was blown up. I searched for some kind of connection to the day's events, but there hadn't been any events.

"Make ball," she clarified, as if directing someone clearly dim-witted.

"Now?"

I was too tired for full sentences. She nodded, and I blew it up, watching dinner revolve in the microwave as the ball grew and grew. I handed it to her and she beamed, jogging over to the front door, and looking back at me expectantly. I leaned on the counter, watching her go, trying to figure her out.

"Daddy," she said firmly, excitement making her eyes just about glow.

"Oh, no," I said, comprehension finally shining through, _"No._ We'll take it to him in the morning. Mummy is really, really tired. Dinner, and then I'm going to go to sleep."

She stood motionless, her eyes widened with sudden fear. What had I said now? What was wrong with sleeping…

"Oh, no, honey, just for a little bit. Just a little while, I promise. In the morning, we'll take Daddy the ball. Ok?"

"Promise?"

I nodded, words caught in my throat.

She drifted into sleep in my arms, and I remembered the day Alex had given her that ball.

She had run down to the park with it, Bhask, Alex and I in tow, strolling through the smoky afternoon light. The last of the autumn leaves clung to near naked branches, shivering in the chill air, holding on to the bitter end, as long as possible, before they fainted down to their fallen, dried up comrades on the ground.

It was a special evening, because it was Alex's last night with us; he was heading north the next day, to our Northern Soul -free zone.

"We're going to have a little play tonight, and then I have to go away tomorrow, but when I come back, we'll play a lot more, ok?" he told her, holding her sides while she drank in his words.

We'd played long into the evening, rolling the ball over the grass between us with our hands, Bhask trying to teach Yash how to kick it, an awkward game of hands on football…

The next day Alex had gone north. And I, for once, had stayed behind. I had enough of the Soul-free zones for a while. Murmansk still lingered in my dreams. But apparently, our North was different.

Alex had called a week later, shining with enthusiasm for the place. Yash ran to get the ball.

"I think Yashie wants to talk to you," I said, watching her jiggle up and down with it at my feet, grinning. I passed her the phone, and she tried to stick the ball awkwardly under one arm.

"Daddy!"

She listened to him speak, nodding occasionally, and he didn't seem to need to hear her to know she was listening rapturously.

"Oh no!" she said, scowling, "No, Daddy."

"What's going on?" I asked, taking the phone from her.

"I was telling Yash it was so nice up here I might stay for longer," he said.

"Oh dear."

"Come with me, all of you."

"Up there?"

"It's wonderful up here, you have to come."

"I don't know." I had not the slightest bit of desire to see another Soul-free zone.

"It's amazing, you'll love it," Alex cajoled, "There's even sunlight!"

"Yeah, but will they love us?"

"They've had Souls up here before. Come on, I miss you guys."

This was something I had no defense for. He could sense me caving in.

"There's a plane comes up on Sunday. Hurry though, there's some festival on…"

"Alright, I'll look into it right away."

"I can't wait to see you, babe."

"Hang on, Yash didn't hear that-"

"You're so funny."

It was only when I hung up I remembered the Peace rally on Sunday. People were rallying all over the world for peace between humans and Souls. Everyone was going to be there. Now we'd miss it, but no matter; seeing Alex was definitely higher on the priority list. I'm not sure peace was even on Yashie's list. It seemed to be mainly consumed with hanging around family.

But as it turned out, we never got on that plane: another family whipped in and got the last seats before us. I left a message with the receptionist at the northern Soul-free zone band council to let Alex know we'd be up the next week, and we went to the rally after all.

And then the plane had crashed, and they had shut down all non-essential aviation in the north. I had forgotten about that, because it was that afternoon that we got the news that Alex had been found unconscious in a frozen lake. And my world had crashed too.

Yashie had been watching me as I took the call, had heard me say his name. She thought he was coming back. I had slid down the cupboards til I was sitting on the kitchen floor, staring at the linoleum, trying to remember how to breathe. I remember Yash tugging on my sleeve, and I look up. She's standing in front me, holding the beach ball. And I had to tell her that Daddy wasn't coming back.

And then I understood why Yashie wanted to take Alex the ball so badly.

Yashie was going to make him keep his promise: he had to come back and play with that ball.


	20. Chapter 20 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

***

"There you go," the driver said, and Blackheath eased himself off the cart, automatically feeling to make sure his gun was still safely tucked into his lower back. He examined the house from under his brim as the horse laboured to draw the cart away through the fields. Old brick and stone, enclosed by verandahs. Two storeys, unusual in the immigrant cottages and farmer's sheds that were the standard accommodation round here. The heavy stonework was shaped into arches to support the brick upper storey, throwing the lower story into shadow like the darkness beneath a bridge. Yet for all its heavy stone and gloomy recesses, it was an elegant house, and its stateliness both drew him and repelled him.

An older man eased forward out of the shadows of the verandah, and Blackheath flinched to think his inspection had itself been inspected.

"You must be Giulia's latest salvage," the man said. Blackheath wasn't sure whether he was being insulted or praised. The man had a face that could go either way, and a voice to match.

"Yanni Thalipedes. Yanni," he extended his hand, "Come in." He led the way into the shadows, not expecting a name or a reply. Blackheath found himself warming to him.

"What did you do to be banished out here with me? Must have been bad, a handsome young man like you," he said conversationally.

"I think she was just sick of having me underfoot, looking after me. She wanted the space."

"Giulia? She fills her life with looking after people. It's her raison d'être."

"So, why isn't she looking after you then?" Blackheath said softly, meaning it to be rhetorical. But the older man paused, taking it seriously.

"She and her mother were very close. Her mother was taken, and, eventually, Anna moved in with me. Well, Giulia has never forgiven me. Daughters can be cruel like that." Blackheath saw the pain this had etched onto his face, despite the covering smile. "Perhaps she has sent you here to punish, me, hmm?"

Blackheath looked around, giving Yanni some space. The floors and walls were all polished wood, enormously wide planks cut from the size of trees that no longer existed. Tall windows let in the cooled, shaded light from the verandahs, creating a sanctuary from the burning heat outside. The corners receded into darkness, which he found somehow comforting: a house that could keep secrets. He trailed his fingers along the paneled walls, soaking it all in.

"What is this place?"

Yanni let him explore at his own pace, following quietly behind.

"It used to be a school. Hasn't been for years."

Blackheath stopped at a larger room, walls obscured by a heavy floor to ceiling growth of books.

"Must have been some school."

"After the invasion started, a group of us got together and brought everyone's books here, for safekeeping."

Blackheath shook his head, smiling. He liked that; aliens were invading and they were worried about their books. He scanned the titles, his fingers coming to rest on a patchwork of leatherbound volumes, all different sizes and shades.

"You've read Yeats?" Yanni asked.

Blackheath glanced at him.

"I had a bit of time on my hands when I was younger," he murmured.

"Ah, recovering from those burns no doubt."

Blackheath traced the ageing scars insensibly, but didn't correct him. He didn't want to lie to him, but saw no need for the truth either.

"_Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.  
The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity_."

"You know it well," Blackheath, quietly impressed.

"Everyone knows that one," Yanni dismissed his praise at a glance.


	21. Chapter 21 Flame

**Flame**

***

"Daddydaddydaddydaddydaddy!" Ayasha ran out of the lift with the ball as soon as the door opened.

Bhask came out of the room, staring at her in dismay.

"You brought her back?" he said with a mixture of despair and disbelief

"Yeah?" I said, annoyed, staring him down. What, did he I think would leave her at home, alone?

"Ah, Hungry Flame, I was hoping to be able to speak to you," a steely looking Soul came out of the room behind him. I smoothed my face of weariness and irritation. "Comforter Constant Green."

"She's a child psychologist," Bhask muttered darkly. I peeked inside the room to see Yashie balance the ball on Alex's chest and settling down to wait, overflowing with anticipation. Alex, of course, may as well have been made out of stone.

"I understand this must be very difficult situation for you all…," the comforter said, trying to catch my eye. I led her away to the visitor's area.

"I was wandering if I might be able to help" she continued. I sat down and listened tolerantly, trying to keep my face pleasant. Or at least pleasantly impassive.

"They tell me Ayasha has been spending a lot of time here."

"She misses her Daddy. We all do."

"Of course. But perhaps sitting on a hospital bed 24 hours a day is not the best environment in which to bring up a child."

I was taken aback at her directness, and searched for a reply.

"Normally her aunt lives with us, she looks after her too… she's away at the moment-"

"Can she not be recalled?"

"She's… fairly remote."

"Ah, I see; a human settlement?"

"Yes."

I understood from the comforter's careful, sour smile that this was not an avenue she would be pursuing.

"I just think Ayasha might benefit from a more stable and… stimulating environment for a while. Her development is very… retarded."

The word stung, and I knew she used it deliberately. I had heard similar things about Bhask. But I wasn't blind, I knew she was not just being prejudiced. Ayasha was slower than other kids her age, to stand, to walk to talk... and it couldn't be blamed on her early start in life any longer.

Still, Soul targets for normal human development were so narrow . What did it matter if she didn't say anything til a few years ago? That she still only used baby talk? She was still a baby. They couldn't take her away from me for being a baby, could they?

"She was born premature. You can't expect her to reach standards in the same manner as other children. She wasn't supposed to live. But she did. And then she stood, walked… I see these things as progress, not retardation," I said, keeping my voice as even as I could.

"I understand her history. But it's clear we are coming from quite different perspectives. I think your closeting and your poor expectations of her may be holding her back from better progress. I know it is difficult bringing her up without a father-"

"She has a father! He's right there!" I couldn't help but explode. Loudly.

"Without an active father then," she corrected diplomatically, refusing to be appalled by my behavior, "I'm sure he would want the best for her."

I wished heartily Alex would get up and defend his daughter. She wouldn't get away with speaking to him like this. _Alex, wake up, we need you_…

"And I know this is not an environment that you do well in either," the Comforter was saying, and I realized I'd not been listening. _Get a grip, Flame_! _Focus_! Her words came back to me and I realized what she meant: she'd read my file. She knew I'd been a long term care patient for months. She'd think we were all insane. What was the point in arguing further?

"Her vocabulary is poor, her sentence structure is underdeveloped," the comforter was still talking, "The nurses have told me her social skills are poor… Does she sleep in her own bed at home?"

"Sometimes," I mumbled. I omitted the 'in the afternoon' and 'when her daddy isn't home'. But she'd play for hours with Etty, and her vocabulary beat Etty's hands down. And Etty was much older. Of course, Etty wasn't a beacon of normality. But who was?

"We are just trying to help, Hungry Flame."

She waited for me to reply, and I gathered my strength.

"I know, and I'm sorry to have to oppose you on this. But telling me you are going to take my children from me is not going to help either me or them."

I gave her my best granite stare.

"What will help then?" she said tightly.

_Wake up my husband? That would be a really big help_… I squashed the thought and cast about for something she would be happy with.

"If he could be moved to a larger room, we could fit another single bed there-"

"We do not want to encourage your whole family to live in the healing centre."

"Just until he wakes up. Please. I'll, I'll look into daycare again for Ayasha. We'll make an effort to improve her vocabulary."

She looked at me long and hard.

"Alright."

***

"Where's Yash?" I said, looking around the room. It was empty bar Alex's negative presence and Bhask sitting defensively in a chair in front of the closet.

"She's in the loo," Bhask said overloudly, looking behind me.

"She's gone," I murmured, and he got up and opened the door, revealing Yashie sitting in the darkness, looking at me wide eyed. I pulled her out and set her back on the bed.

"I wasn't going to let them take her, Bhask," I said softly, feeling about ready to break with fatigue already and it was only morning.

"Neither was I," he muttered, "Yashie didn't like her either. You yelled at her. Yashie would have put Alex in the cupboard if she could've. I told her we were just waiting for you to give us a hand."

I looked down the list of words she was supposed to know, sitting close to Alex as if his presence might ward away any more such 'helpful' Souls, rubbing Yash's back.

"She knows half of these!" Bhask said angrily, reading over my shoulder.

"Yeah, but they want to hear her say them. And on cue. Have you ever heard her say them?"

"She's not some circus act to be trained."

I sighed quietly and looked at Ayasha. She watched me carefully.

"Door," I said clearly, pointing at the door, "That's a door."

She looked at me like her opinion of my intelligence had just plummeted.

"See, she knows that's a door. She just has no need to actually say it," Bhask said, slouching in his chair, "She gets along fine. Look at Etty!"

I sat up on the bed and pulled Yashie onto my lap.

"You know about sharing right?" I told her quietly. She nodded almost imperceptibly, distracted, worried I was trying to take her away from her daddy.

"Alright. So it's not nice when someone has all the toys, it makes other people sad. And it's not nice when someone has to do all the work, it makes them sad too, right?"

She glanced at me and nodded again, one eye still on Alex, but starting to hope I wasn't there to separate her from him.

"Well, that's what words are like. The people want to share words with you. They don't like it that they have to all the talking. We know you understand, but they want to hear the words from you, not us. Ok?"

She watched me for a full second.

"So can you say door for me?" I prompted.

She looked between me and Bhask, then curled her arms up and buried them in her lap.

"Door," she said softly, throwing me a sparkling, mischievous glance.

"You are Mummy's most favouritest girl in the whole word."


	22. Chapter 22 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

*******

Blackheath was up at dawn, walking around the property, training himself to move without dragging his leg, building up his endurance. The wind blew dust in circles around the house, the paddocks dry and cracking in the heat. In contrast to the stale, mummified smells of the paddocks, a strong scent of orange blossom hung heavy in the air, seeping out from a patch of dark green leaves half hidden behind a rock wall.

"You look like you've got somewhere to go, but you know you're actually just walking in circles?"

Yanni had been watching him again. Blackheath tried not to feel under surveillance; the old man had no one else to bother.

"I've got to get it right by the time the truck comes back."

"Heading into Soul territory?"

Blackheath scowled automatically at the word.

"Heading _back _into Soul territory by the sounds," Yanni mused, watching his face for confirmation. His eyes pierced him like pins holding down an insect.

"What happened to your leg?"

"Giulia."

"Before that."

"I was shot."

"Hopefully not by Giulia."

He smiled, amused.

"No, she'd do the job properly I reckon."

"And not by Seekers."

Blackheath froze with hatred at the word. Everybody did.

"No, they would have done the job properly too, at least in terms of medical attention. You'd have pretty silver eyes by now, my boy."

"I'd rather die," he growled.

"Obviously, to come have all the way out here for Giulia's excellent medical attention."

Blackheath paused, leaning on a fencepost, trying to clearing his mind momentarily of the hatred in his heart and the ache in his leg.

"You can smell those oranges in Griffith," he said, indicating the little orchard with a glance.

"Not these ones," Yanni replied, "Used to be orchards all around here. Most of them died after the invasion when the irrigation scheme shut down. Now we got a trickle of water back, things are starting to grow again. You gotta give the Souls that, they do what's best for the long term."

Blackheath grimaced and rubbed his leg distractedly.

"You're acquainted with them?" Yanni said, watching him carefully.

"Personally." Blackheath muttered, feeling the thin scar on the back of his neck burn as if it were alien tissue.

"Ah. I see."

"Come and tell me what you think of our oranges," Yanni said, leading the way back to the house. After a moment, Blackheath followed.

***

The kitchen table was as old as the house. Blackheath's fingers traced lives in the chips and scratches carving through the grain. In the morning light, the edges of the kitchen were still wrapped in night, the house refusing to succumb to the dictates of the outside world.

Yanni poured him a glass of the orange juice he had just squeezed.

"It's good, no? But don't tell me you came out here just for our oranges. They tell me they have oranges in Soul cities too."

Blackheath looked away, trying to keep the hatred from showing too plainly on his face.

Yanni sawed at a damper loaf and set the slices over the hearth fire to toast.

"You're in a Soul-free zone now. No one hides their hatred of the Souls."

Blackheath was too used to dissembling to speak freely. But what held him back more was that he felt no reflection of this hatred from Yanni.

"I'm rather sick of polite meaningless words. But I have the feeling you'll spare me those."

"Why do you live here?" Blackheath stalled, searching for some substance behind Yanni's indifferent words.

Yanni shrugged.

"I've always lived here. It's peaceful. It's where my daughter was born. Not everyone has been transported here, and sees it through vengeful eyes."

"Would you live here still if it was Soul territory?"

Yanni watched him shrewdly for a moment. "It will shock you, I think, but I would."

Blackheath held his face still, but could not keep his eyes from smouldering.

"You are my host," he said tightly, looking away, "You have treated me well. I don't want to argue with you."

"Please. It will do us both good I think. Perhaps Giulia sent you here to treat me."

"You would live amongst them? Willingly?" Blackheath leaned towards him, his gaze fiercely intent.

"I'm too old to be implanted. They would not hurt me, I think."

"And that's it? You'd be quite happy for them to take over, parasitizing other people, so long as they leave you alone?"

"They are parasites, it is true. And what dog ever praised his fleas?"

Blackheath's anger was so intense his muscles held themselves taut and he had to stand to ease the cramp of pain from his thigh. He rested his fists on the table as he tried to relax his leg.

"I see you have a fierce hatred of our visitors," Yanni observed, turning the bread over to toast the other side.

"They are barbaric," Blackheath spat.

"Montaigne would agree with you. Because they kill others to survive?"

"Because they kill us!"

"They are predators, pure and simple. The same as us. Any prey fears its predator."

"No. Not the same as us. They take over our bodies, our family's bodies, live our lives. When we kill, our victim is dead, and left to rest in peace."

"Or stuffed and hung on the mantelpiece. Or worn down a red carpet. What does it matter what happens to the bodies?"

"I was one of those bodies! I was still there!"

To this Yanni had no response, but his eyes remained kind and sad. Blackheath felt the old man had a story he was not telling, and tried unsuccessfully to reign in his anger.

"You're saying if they came to take Giulia, you could just stand by and let them?" Blackheath knew no father could do that.

"No. No, I expect I couldn't. But that doesn't mean they have no right to-"

"That's exactly what it means!"

"A cow will mourn her calf when it is taken to slaughter, but we still retain the right to do it. It is necessary for each species to think it is wrong to kill its own. That is critical for the survival of the species. But it does not make it wrong for another to kill them to further his own. It makes it sad, perhaps, very sad, often, but not wrong."

Blackheath was tormented by images of Flame, drowning as he watched, standing at the end of his gun. Was it wrong to kill her? If he thought it wrong to kill her, he would be recognizing her as more than alien, as a part of his world, his life, his family. If he thought it wrong to kill her, then he was wrong to have tried. And would he not be wrong for killing so many others too? Where would the line be drawn? He could not accept this.

"You are talking about humans as if they are animals."

"We are. And so are they."

"You talk as if there is no right and wrong!"

"No, I'm sure there are. It just depends on how you define them."

Blackheath had to smile at that. Yanni took the toasts from the heat of the flames and buttered them thickly.

"Everything is relative," Blackheath murmured. In prison, it had not been considered at all relative; it had been quite simple: the powerful were right and the others wrong. Blackheath could not help but disagree, and this opened him to Yanni's argument. He hesitated, but took the proffered toast.

"Exactly. Shades of grey, not blacks and whites. Most people prefer absolutes, the brain is trained to look for edges, contrasts. Us and them. It is necessary to have others so you can recognize yourself. It is also a prerequisite for enabling violence. You cannot fight part of yourself. You must make what you fight the other."

And there, for Blackheath, the line was drawn. As he loved Dorsey, and Dorsey loved Flame, Flame was undeniably part of "us". The others were not. The line could be drawn between them. It was an artificially constructed line, and its premises were messy in his head, which bothered him. But he knew life was messy. This was the line of best fit for pre existing variables.

"And who is 'the other' for you?" Blackheath asked.

"Aye, there's the rub. My problem is, I have too much empathy. 'The view from everywhere', eh? I have been 'the other' too many times to fit anyone easily into that box. Perhaps I see too much of myself in others. 'What are strangers but friends we have not met'?"

_Not everyone you meet is a friend_, Blackheath thought, but held his tongue, unwilling to antagonise his host any further. "It must make it difficult to recognize yourself then."

"Perhaps. But perhaps it is preferable to lose sight of yourself than to block out the sight of others? It is not the way of the world, I know, and in another time I daresay I would be locked up for it. But what can we be, if not to our own self true?"

Blackheath felt the man was slightly mad, but at the same time, he appreciated his gentle, incisive madness.

"I am glad Giulia sent to you to me," Yanni said, leaning back and settling comfortably in his chair, "No one has bothered to argue with me for years."


	23. Chapter 23 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

*******

The doorbell chimed far into the house. She stood behind my knees, taking it in turns to stare at the street and then back at the door. This was not the greatest idea, I knew, but there were not a whole lot of other options.

Paolo was a regular house visit for me. He'd been bitten by a dog some weeks ago, and hadn't yet left the house. But at least he was talking. I felt I couldn't put him on the backburner while I had this girl staying with me; who knew how long that would be?

Last week I'd tried leaving her at home with Sam and a babysitter, a young comforter, who had strict instructions to leave her be. This had resulted in frantic phone call halfway through Paolo's session, informing me that my previously solid child had irretrievably vanished into thin air.

"I can't open the door to her room, but I went outside to look in through the window, and she's definitely not there, and I've searched everywhere, she must have run away-"

This was the child that refused to go into the backyard without me.

"Where's Sam?" I'd asked calmly.

"The dog?"

"Uh huh."

"He's uh, he's lying in the kitchen?"

"Ok." Sam wasn't worried by the sounds of it. But she was obviously not comfortable with the babysitter. "I'll be right over."

I apologized to Paolo and went to find his parents. "I'm sorry, my other charge and the babysitter aren't getting on."

"Oh dear," Mrs Hutchden said, while her husband looked worried.

"I'm afraid I'll have to cut it short this time," I said, making for the door.

"We'll see you next week though?"

"Ah, I guess that depends on my finding a new babysitter," I said, glancing back and smiling apologetically.

"Well, why don't you bring her here? It would be good for Paulie to see some other kids."

"Aah, she's… really shy."

"Well. Better than too loud!" Mr Hutchden said.

"At least you wouldn't be worrying about her, if she was here?" Mrs Hutchden added.

It was hard to say no to their hopeful faces. Besides which, I didn't know if I'd have another option.

"That's kind of you. I'll let you know what she thinks," I'd said.

When I got home the first thing to do was to loudly send the babysitter away. Then I waited outside her bedroom door. Sam loped up, sniffed it, and loped back down to the kitchen to collapse where the floor was cooler.

"She's really gone," I called to the blank door, "unless it's me you're mad at?"

There was a sound of scuffling and the door opened to reveal her lying on her belly, legs still half under the bed, dragging the chair away. Sam heaved himself up and came to join us.

"Was she that bad, honey?" I asked softly.

"She asked questions," came the shuttered reply.

"Bugger. I told her to leave you alone."

"I know."

***

So the next week she came with me. At least this way I could intervene if someone was scaring her.

She stilled as footsteps approached the door. Mr and Mrs Hutchden greeted us together, wedged side by side in the doorway like some two headed monster.

"Hi there," they said staring at the shape hiding behind my knees, "Nice to meet you, what's your name?"

Shit. Name, name, name… what would she respond to?

"Honey," I said, returning their smiles, "Her name's Honey."

She looked up at me thoughtfully, but made no protest.

"Hi Honey," the Hutchden's intoned as one.

'Honey' stared back at them doubtfully.

"Like I said, she's pretty shy," I said, stepping forward so they would let us in.

"How about we put you over here," I set Honey's bag of goodies by the bookcase where I could keep an eye on her, and went to say hello to Paolo. She plugged herself into the ipod, carefully avoiding making eye contact with anyone.

"Hey, Paolo, how's it going?" I asked, sitting in front of him at the table. He'd have to turn away from her to look at me, and consequently didn't.

"She's pretty," he breathed.

I looked at her to assess this. I'd never looked at her that way. Black curls, almond eyes. She _was_ pretty. She was also entirely stiff and staring right through her ipod, frowning.

"Well, yeah I guess she is. But she's real shy too, so we're going to leave her alone today. Unless I'm not pretty enough for you to talk to anymore?"

I picked up one of the drawings he was working on.

"This is a great picture," I said, examining it closely. It was of a dog headed monster in garish colours. "Really powerful. It kinda lets me know what you're feeling."

He dragged his eyes away from her and back to the picture.

"Sometimes it's nice to have that out, huh?" I said, glancing over at Honey as she turned her volume all the way up, drowning us out.

***

"What did you think of Paulo?" I asked her, driving home.

"He's a woos," she said, gazing at the passing scene like it was a movie. "He just pretends he's afraid cause he likes talking to you."

Interesting perspective.

"We should bring Sammy next time," she said casually. I didn't whether to laugh or frown. Bring Sammy to visit a child with a crippling phobia of dogs. It was downright cruel, and I wondered if her lack of empathy stemmed from not understanding the problem or not believing it.

"Well, maybe I am going too slow with him," I said, seeking a compromise, "Maybe we'll take him outside next time, hey?"

"Copy that," she said, still glued to the window.


	24. Chapter 24 Flame

**Flame**

*******

"Betty," Yashie said loudly and pointedly, stopping the nurse in her tracks as she came through the door.

"She knows her own name, you dope," Bhask muttered, closing his book with a sigh. But Ayasha was undeterred.

"Betty. I'm Ayassie," she said, fixing the nurse with a charming smile.

"Well. Nice to meet you Ayassie," the nurse said, smiling hesitantly, clearly wondering where the little devil child had gone. But Yashie was determined to prove she could speak, and was bailing up anyone that came into the room. I had a terrible suspicion she knew they would take her away if she couldn't make enough progress.

"I better get home," I said, kissing Bhask's head, "Goodnight Yaya."

"Night Mummy. See you tomorrow. Have a good sleep," Yashie replied, overly conscious of Betty's presence behind us. I was reminded of a dog frantically doing tricks to escape a punishment, and hugged her sadly.

"See you tomorrow, baby."

***

It was windy as I drove home, the car buffeted by the side stepping gusts. It made me think of a night at Dorsey's camp, high on the ridge, watching the wind cutting through the autumn grasses in the moonlight, driving the pines wild with grief. I'd escaped the closeness of the summer camp to this isolated spot, hoping to get a better view of my thoughts. So far all I'd got was worried, confused, and cold.

I didn't fit with the Souls. I was constantly having to watch my temper, watch my words. But I didn't fit with the humans either. For one thing, they kept trying to kill me. But even those I was closest to, I couldn't feel completely comfortable with. I couldn't come to terms with the fact that my own husband had voluntarily cut off another person's toe. That didn't fit well inside me, and it made me wonder whether I could really fit in with any humans, in the long term.

"I've been looking for you," Alex said, coming up the path behind me, as if conjured by my thoughts, "Dorsey said I'd find you up here. What's up?"

"Oh, just quietly freaking out," I said lightly, making room for him on the flat boulder by the steep slope of the hill. He frowned at the sound of my voice. He was not liking my light tone.

"Not the whole toe thing again."

"I try not to think about it, but…"

"That's really your thing, isn't it? Trying not to think about it, hoping it'll just turn out? Like with Bhask…"

I wondered if he was referring to before he had met me or after I thought Bhask had died. I supposed either would be appropriate.

"Yeah, well, that's not working out so well at the moment."

He looked like I had punched him in the guts.

"No, don't look like that. It's not you personally. Well, it is, but-"

I wouldn't leave him. I couldn't leave him. But how could I stay?

"You think it was easy for me? Cutting off that toe? It wasn't easy. It _shouldn't _be easy."

I couldn't meet his eyes. I never knew what do with this side of Alex, but pretending it didn't exist sat more and more awkwardly in my mind.

"Why do Seekers use guns?" he asked, following my eyes out over the woodland.

I shrugged.

"It's quicker, there's less suffering…"

"You could kill, if you had to, with a gun?"

"I should've killed Kelly," I muttered. She had tried to kill Falling Smoke, almost taken Alex away from me, not to mention the people she'd killed or burnt.

"You didn't even have a gun," Alex said, "But fine. Would you have strangled her, if you'd been close enough?"

"Strangled…?"

"What's the difference between strangling her and firing at her?"

He looked at me, but I struggled to respond.

"It's easier. It's easier for both of you. But killing someone shouldn't be easy. A punishment should be difficult to give, else things get out of hand. It shouldn't be easy."

"It's easy for Blackheath," I said, looking away.

"I don't know about that," he replied, frowning, "Too easy, maybe."

His animosity towards Blackheath had faded over the years as he had been able to see past the hurt of his betrayal, to the man he had known before, the man that had been a good friend. Ever since Dorsey had returned, his comments had begun to betray that he felt for him, trapped in a foreign place far from the person he would give anything to be with.

"You shouldn't have to do it in the first place," I grumbled, sick of the whole vicious circle of fighting and punishment.

"Killing? Fighting? What happens when people stop fighting? Stop fighting for what they believe in? They'll give up. How will we improve then?"

"They don't have to stop _striving_… "

"Where do you draw the line? _You_ would fight. Why is it acceptable for you but not for others?"

"Because we know where to stop."

"But you don't… Or maybe you won't know where to start. If we hadn't fought Blackheath… Look. I think you confuse what you do to individuals and what you do for the public good. You can have your rules for individuals, but you can't play by the same rules when society is at stake. The greater good. Blackheath gets that."

"You think it's ok that he massacred people?"

"I'm not saying I agree, I'm saying I understand why he did it."

He sighed and shook his head at the look in my eyes.

"Dorsey doesn't agree with him, but she understands. That's what lets her be with him. You need to understand a bit more."

I continued to stare at the wind-ripped grasslands, not understanding, and feeling more and more like I never would.

"Ok, look… have you seen the Crucible?"

I nodded, grimacing at the disturbing memory.

"They were killing people, torturing people, because some girls pointed at them-"

"Yeah, evil humans, blah blah. I'm talking about the end. Proctor has the chance to sign a confession? If he does it, he can go free?"

"But he doesn't. It's a lie."

"And they kill him. You think that's right?"

"He can only choose to do what's right himself, it's the others that hang him. He can't make them do the right thing. He can only to do the right thing for himself."

"No, see that's wrong. If he didn't have a wife and kids, sure, he can make what decision he likes, it's his life. But he's playing with their lives too. They depend on him. His decision affects them too. He should have made the decision that saved the greater good. He was selfish."

"No," I disagreed on so many levels I didn't even know where to begin, "If he signed, he supported what was happening, he was letting it continue… and by your logic, you shouldn't have got cut off Vasily's toe, because he's only an individual. And-"

He groaned in frustration, and I shut up, watching him anxiously. Part of me longed to be able to reconcile Alex's violence, explain it away so he was irrevocably good in my mind, but part of me felt it would be wrong to. Dorsey might be able to accept Blackheath as he is, accept his violence, but I could not. Yet if I couldn't, how could I stay with him? And as I watched him scowling into the moonlight, desperately searching for a way to make me understand, I knew I couldn't bear the thought of being apart from him either.

"Vasily didn't try to kill you because he hated you personally. He tried to kill you because you were a Soul."

"For the greater good of humanity."

"You know you don't believe that," he said quietly, and I was the first to look away.

"There had to be a consequence for his actions. You thought that with Kelly too, remember? ," Alex went on. He was right, but I was unconvinced that I was justified in thinking that way, "I had to try and persuade him that what he had done was wrong. I know you know he wouldn't listen to me."

"And do you think it will deter him?

"I don't know."

"Well what's the point in punishing people if it doesn't change anything? It's like punishing a wolf for killing a calf."

"A wolf cannot help who he is, nor can he change it. But people can, given a reason to."

"Then why couldn't you reason with him."

"Humans aren't like Souls, sometimes they have to be given a physical reason to back off. You want to try reasoning with Blackheath?"

I knew that would be hopeless. I sighed, giving up, and let him pull me into a hug, wrapping his parka around me.

"Proctor couldn't fight the witch hunt. He had tried. He should have known when he was beat. You have to pick your battles. And how to fight them. You told me that. But that means you've got to fight some with everything you've got."

It was beautifully warm in his arms. His body fit around me perfectly, like it was built to enclose me, wrapping snugly round my back and shoulders, his chest solid and toasty beneath my cheek. And he knew not to try and argue with me further, he didn't invade my mental space. He just held me close, trying to convince me to trust him.

This was where I fit. This was where I felt the world was right. The only place in the world I felt right was with my family. Staying with them was the only thing that made sense.


	25. Chapter 25 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

*******

The screen glowed dimly, but it seemed to him a beacon in the darkened offices. He waited impatiently while the software scrolled through the files, searching. Outside the office tower windows, the city stretched out, suburbs lapping the horizon. Somewhere out there she was waiting. In the street? Locked up in a Soul centre, awaiting implantation? Maybe it was too late… but it was never too late.

His other hand played with a scrap of paper, folding and unfolding it, casting a glance over the words written there.

_

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

_

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

Yanni had pressed the words into his hands when he left, saying:

"I cannot give you my library but… please, return whenever you miss it."

He had read the words then and there while the truck grumbled fretfully, waiting for him to get on.

"Do you know what they are from?" Yanni asked, his eyes penetrating and inescapable.

"A prayer for my daughter…," Blackheath murmured quietly, his face tight, "and… that one where the rebels got hung." Yeats again. The scrap of paper disturbed naggingly. He couldn't answer the question. He felt he ought to be able to, but he couldn't. He didn't like Yanni's choice, putting those two poems together, like he was saying that Blackheath was the cause of his own problems, that he had endangered his daughter with his actions. But maybe he was reading too much into it, sensitized to anything about daughters because he hadn't seen his own in so long.

A joyful electronic ping signaled he had found it, bringing him back abruptly from the glaring sun of the memories to the dark blue quiet of the office. Photo recognition software.

He upload his own photo from the Seeker database and configured the parameters til the file was accepted. His face stared back at him from the screen, now labeled Jack Rankine. It was not the Jack Rankine that any human who had met him would recognize, but computers recognized what they were told to. And now they would not recognize him.

It was a useless deception in this country, as any person who had met him would not be fooled. His face, let alone his name, was still a death warrant here, wanted for a curling list of offences in the undeclared war on Souls.

But international borders were open to Jack Rankine.


	26. PART TWO Ch 26 Flame

PART TWO

- RECONNECTING -

* * *

**Flame**

***

I waited in front of the lifts, Yashie-less, starting the well worn trip back home to sleep. I felt like I was never truly awake, never alive, hovering zombie-like through the weeks while Alex slept on. _How long_? A voice whispered in my heart. _How long_?

The doors of the lift opened, and my breath froze in my throat. Opposite me, inside the doors, staring at me in equal shock, was Blackheath.

_Blackheath_.

Here.

How was that possible?

He was a prohibited person in this country. He couldn't just walk down the street. If anyone recognized him , he was dead. Or as good as.

The doors began to slide shut and we both acted automatically, Blackheath holding his arm against the slow heave of the doors, and me to slip inside the compartment. His arm dropped and let the doors rumble shut. I stared at my reflection in the metallic doors, motionless. I had the feeling of being in a coffin. Enclosed with Death.

"Ground floor?" Blackheath said quietly, and I nodded mechanically. He pressed the button and the lift heaved into motion.

"You're back?" I whispered, fear straining my voice.

"I've just come for Dorsey. I'm leaving as soon as I've found her," he murmured, his voice strangely intense. Was he afraid too?

"She's not here," I whispered back, still staring straight ahead.

"I heard Alex was here-"

"No," I said, turning to him, shutting my eyes briefly at the mention of the forbidden name, "she's not here at all. She's at home."

"I have to talk to her."

I shook my head, frustrated.

"No, not home here. Home with George."

Realization dawned on his face in parallel with desperation.

"I have to see her."

***

Leaving the rest of the house in darkness, I pulled the radio forward out of its dust free square and powered it up. Blackheath played the answering machine, listening in silence to Dorsey's message.

"I just heard about Alex. I guess you're at the hospital... I'll meet you there."

He traced his fingers over the numbers as they were her face.

"Its old," I murmured, "I just haven't deleted it yet." Finally I found the right channel, and heard Henry's voice. "Henry, can you get me Dorsey please?" I interrupted.

"Hey there! Long time no, uh-"

"Henry…"

"Ah, ok…. Just hang on a moment. She's coming. Are, are you ok?"

"I just want to talk to Dorsey, ok?"

"Sure, okay. Here she is."

"How's Alex?" Dorsey's voice rang from the speakers, direct as always, like she was in the next room, and I saw Blackheath lean imperceptibly forward, reaching for her.

"Yeah, um, the same. Look, Dorsey, I have, an, an old friend of yours here visiting."

"Oh really? Who?"

I paused, grasping for words to get my meaning across without endangering him.

"He's a bit shy. Uh, he didn't even speak to you the first time you met…"

Dorsey was silent for so long I was about to repeat myself.

"Oh my god," she breathed, and I realized it was shock that kept her quiet.

"He, uh, he'd like to see you."

"He's with you now?"

"Yes."

"Is Bhask with you?"

"No, he's at the hospital." Was she really going to be a stickler for the human-only rule for the radio network now?

"Dorse, it's been a really, really long day-"

"Is he alone?" She was close to tears.

"What? Um, yeah. Yeah, he is…?"

Blackheath leaned back with his eyes closed, his face anguished.

"Dorsey?" I asked as the silence stretched.

"Can you ask him why?" She was definitely crying now.

Blackheath was shaking his head over and over, his face still intensely pained.

"Uh, I think you could probably talk about it when you see him?"

Blackheath leaned forward tiredly and wrote a quick note.

"If… if you want to see him?" I added, reading his scrawl.

"Yes," she replied eventually, "Yes I do. But I can't come. We're snowed in."

"He… he uh could get a snowmobile."

"It's too dangerous. I mean, the fords aren't frozen-"

"The fords have been frozen for weeks, Dorsey!" a voice came from the background, and I recognized Jake.

Dorsey was silent. I knew what she was trying to say. Blackheath was risking cold storage going there. Everyone would recognize him. If anyone saw him, he was dead. But the snowmobile helmet would hide him from the scouts…

"I know you might worry about him, as, as he's never been before, but if you told the scouts that he was coming, I can tell him the way… maybe you could meet him halfway? At the ridge?"

"I don't know."

I bit my lip, watching Blackheath hang painfully on her silence. Finally she spoke.

"Alright. Alright, I'll meet him."

We agreed on the details of time and date, and I turned off our signal.

"I can't call the snowmobile shop til the morning," I said.

Blackheath nodded, and I suddenly noticed how weary he was. How long had he been on the run?

I got some fresh sheets and started pulling the old ones off Dorsey's bed. He took them out of my hands and sat on the bed.

"What's wrong with Alex?" he said softly.

I slid slowly down the doorframe, wrapping my arms rigid tight to contain the pain.

"He's in a coma."

"For how long?"

"A few months now."

I took a deep breath.

"We don't even know if he's still there. Ayasha's just, just waiting for him to wake up. She won't leave him."

Blackheath sat silently for a while, then lay down on the bed. I left him and buried myself in my own.

***

The next morning I picked up the snowmobile and towed it back to the house. I handed Blackheath the car keys. I was beyond wondering if I should help him. Dorsey needed him, and I needed the head space. But he hadn't left. He was still standing there.

"Thank you for all you've done," he said quietly. _You're weird_, I thought, too tired to work out where he was coming from now, "I know it can't have been easy for you… I just want you to know, I won't, I won't hurt you."

_I know_, I thought, but it was another thing entirely to be confident enough to say it to his face.

"Why not?" I said instead, making a last ditch effort to understand him better.

"Because you're her sister," he said eventually, and even I could see that wasn't the whole truth. But I knew if he admitted to thinking a soul was human, he was on a slippery slope. I left it at that. But he went on.

"It's just that, Dorsey… isn't going to be real pleased with me. She'll think you're endangering yourself but… I won't hurt you."

I was puzzled.

"Dorsey knows that."

He shook his head.

"Dorsey doesn't trust me."


	27. Chapter 27 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

*******

"Who's this?"

The face in the photo instantly froze my heart with grief.

"That's my sister. Olivia."

She pointed to the children in front of her, and I couldn't reply for tears. I turned the photo over and she laboriously spelt out the names.

"Olivia… Emily and,… Chloe." Each name towed a caravan of memories. "They're your family?"

"They used to be," I whispered, letting the tears just flow, "They died. In an accident."

She stared at the picture.

"You miss them," she said softly.

"Yeah," I replied, smiling at her, "I always will."

"I miss my Daddy."

I wondered why she never spoke of her mother this way. Did she not miss her too? Did she not think it was acceptable to miss her? Or was she angry with her for having left?

"Yeah, honey, I bet you do," I sighed, drawing her into a hug, as much for me as for her, "We'll find him."

"We can't find him!" she wailed suddenly, throwing the photo to the floor, "He told me to wait, and I did, but I couldn't wait anymore, and I moved, and now he won't find me!"

She dissolved into sobs, and I rocked her, listening intently. This was the most she'd ever told me about what happened, and I wasn't going to interrupt her for anything.

"He won't ever find me," she wept. _There had to be a way_, I thought. There was no way he doesn't want to find her. I couldn't accept that. So there had to a way.

"What if... what if he didn't come back because he's dead?" she whispered, one hand clutching my top and the other curling into her stomach.

"No, I don't think he's dead, honey," I replied.

"How do you know?"

"That sort of thing just doesn't happen. People don't just walk away and die. They searched all the hospitals, the police reports, there was nothing about anyone that could have been your Daddy. If he was dead they would have found him. I reckon he got held up somehow, and now he's missing you just as much as you're missing him, and he'll be crazy worried about you, and he'll be looking for you everywhere. We've just got to figure out how to find him too."

"We can't find him," she whispered sadly.

"I think we've got to try?"

"No, we _can't_ find him!"

I battled my frustration. How on earth were we supposed to find him if she didn't even believe we would? Or was it that she didn't think we should? But that made no sense.

"Ok, alright, but we can help him find us, right?"

She didn't reply, looking uncertain. But she hadn't said we couldn't. I'd take that as a yes.


	28. Chapter 28 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

***

The noise of the engine enclosed him in his own private world as he sped over the snow. Dorsey had warned him she would run, back when they had first got together. He remembered that time well; she'd been driving him crazy, turning him on fire one day and playing ice queen the next. He'd finally got her to settle down and tell him what was going on. She'd talked all around it, and finally she'd started to get down to the nub.

"I've just had some guys that stuffed me around in the past…" she'd said, her face on his shoulder and her body curled into his.

"I'm not going to stuff you around," he said quietly, his fingertips smoothing circles on the miraculously perfect angle of her shoulder.

"No, I don't mean that. I know _you _wouldn't…"

She shifted out of his reach and sat by herself, not touching him, not looking at him. He was beginning to understand she was really fighting to tell him something, something so hard for her to say that her whole body fought back to keep it from him. He waited, but her words seemed to choke her.

"You going to tell me about those guys, then?" he said softly, resting his chin on his knees, patient.

"Oh god," she said, looking away, eyes shining, but he felt she was edging closer to talking to him, closer to letting go.

"Ah, well, there was Mike… I just about died when I found out he liked me. He was with this older group of kids, they never would've let me hang around if it wasn't for him. But I wasn't a kid to him. I would've done anything for him. Probably did too. Anyway, they were getting into some pretty dark stuff, and of course, we got caught. I guess, as the youngest, they reckoned the police would go easy on me. Or maybe coz I was the newbie… anyway I wasn't sticking up for myself; they'd told me to keep quiet and I was sticking to it, stupid little twerp.

"So they sent me to juvie and… I got the fright of my life. I found out I was pregnant and I was terrified, I had no idea what would happen. If they'd said they were going to put me in iso I'd have believed it… Anyway, there was this guard there and, he… he made me feel safer. I thought, if I was with him the other girls would keep out of my face, you know? I knew he wasn't some knight in shining armour. He really got off on that whole guard-prisoner thing."

She was lost in the past til he slid his hand over hers.

"Well, he found out I was pregnant and he got really mad. He thought it was his, he was going to lose his job, and he was hitting me... but he wouldn't stop. The other girls heard what was going on and eventually they got the other guards to believe them and check it out. So they found me, and they took me to the hospital…"

"and you lost it?"

"No, the baby survived… that's just how they found out I was pregnant. But they weren't real pleased. They told me he would probably be brain damaged and… I couldn't keep him in jail… and they made me decide… I decided to get rid of him. And then they sent me back to school."

He waited while the grief passed and she could go on.

"Anyway. I got a bit of a reputation from that. Didn't matter what I did, it stuck. The invasion was a good thing for me, that way, you know? A chance to start learning to be someone else. Maybe even me. Not as easy as it sounds though. I'm so used to just taking what I want as soon as I can and just running away before they can get their fingernails into me."

She turned and looked at him for the first time, her eyes yearning for him to understand.

"_I don't want to be that girl with you. _But… but, part of me wants to run already."

He drew her back into his embrace, kissing her tears away softly.

"Maybe, I won't let you get what you want, until not a single fibre in your body wants to go anywhere."

A tiny smile twitched her lips, as he teased her with kisses that always just missed them.

"What makes you think you can make me?" she said, looking up into his face then and smiling her Cheshire smile, sliding her hands under his shirt.

"I think I can keep you interested," he said, kissing her full on the lips til she relaxed completely in his arms.

"Of course, you run away anytime you want," he said, pulling away, and evading her following face, "But you think real hard before you go anywhere. I won't be coming after you."

She leaned back and looked at him, serious.

"You wouldn't?"

"No. You make that choice, I have to respect that. What's chasing after you going to do? Either make me look stupid because you mean it, or you look stupid because you don't. I'm not into looking stupid. So you think about that, because I won't come after you."

But here he was, doing exactly what he promised he would not do.


	29. Chapter 29 Flame

**Flame**

***

The house was still and quiet in the morning light and I wondered what had woken me up. I should have been up already, but I was putting off going to the hospital til the last possible moment. That was the part of me that couldn't bear seeing Alex lying there like a corpse anymore. But the other side of that was that I couldn't bear leaving him alone either.

Then a heard a soft footstep in the corridor, and I sat up, catching sight of Dorsey watching me from the corridor, Blackheath lurking behind.

"Dorsey!"

She ran over and squeezed me hard.

"You poor bub," she hissed, pressing her cheek against my head.

"I'm alright," I said, hoping to conjure a smile from my unaccustomed cheeks, "hang on a sec, I have to call Bhask."

"I'm going to see Alex before I leave," Dorsey said, glancing at me, and then Blackheath. There was no argument with that tone of voice. I nodded as the phone rang.

"I'm going to be a bit late today, I'm bringing Dorsey-"

"Dorsey!"

"Yeah I'll tell you about it later. Do you want me to call work?"

"No, I'll tell them, they won't mind, they know about…"

We both struggled to talk around these things to painful to mention.

"Ok. I'll call you as soon as we get to the carpark."

***

It wasn't til we were in the sanctity of the hospital lift that Dorsey began to talk.

"Thank so much for everything," she started, "If he hadn't found you…" she struggled to convey what she couldn't say. I smiled at her, knowing the feeling.

"So don't take this the wrong way," she said, looking away for a moment then holding me firm in her gaze.

"I don't want you to be alone with him. Blackheath. Ever."

The intensity of her feeling surprised me, but not her words.

"He said you'd say something like that."

"Oh he did, did he? What did he say, exactly?"

"That… that you didn't trust him."

Her gaze shifted through me and became furious.

"Well he's right, there," she hissed.

"He said he would never hurt me, Dorsey."

"And you believe him?"

It wasn't like Dorsey to be like this. Not about Blackheath. My words faltered in my throat.

"The reason I left him… it was about you."

"Dorsey, you were half a world away, how was he ever going to be a danger to me?"

"Please just shut up."

She kicked lightly and repetitively at the side of the lift where it met the floor.

"I had a kid with him. A little girl. And I came home one day, and I find… I find he's teaching her how to swim."

_A little girl,_ I thought, stunned,_ Dorsey had had a little girl…_

"How to swim?" Was that bad? Bhask had taught Ayasha how to swim…

"He swims like a fish, Flame," she said, her words attacking the lift wall too, "So don't go telling me he didn't pull the trigger or any crap that like. He watched you drown and he was just going to sit there and let you die."

I couldn't say a thing, and the lift carried us higher in silence.

***

"Mum?" the lift doors had opened and Bhask was waiting for me, looking worried, "You ok?"

I realized I was standing there alone.

I heard a hard slap come from Alex's room and Dorsey bursting into tears. Bhask and I hurried past the horrified Healing staff.

"She hit him!" they told me, disturbed.

"Yeah, sorry, she's been a bit stressed lately. She'll be ok," I tried to smile convincingly, sidling into the room and shutting the door, while Bhask sat next to Dorsey, putting his arm around her. Yashie was glaring at her furiously, perched as usual by Alex's side. I went and joined them, sitting on Alex's other side, rubbing Yashie's back gently.

"Sorry. Shouldn't have done that," Dorsey mumbled, "I just didn't think he'd look so… gone."

I took a quiet breath, forcefully pushed everything to the back of my mind and selected one problem at a time.

"Ok, Dorsey. I'm kind of reeling here. I don't, um… You have a daughter…?"

She nodded.

"And…and you left her?"

"I left Blackheath. She stayed with him."

"But she's… a baby? Right?"

"It's where she belonged. You know how we always used to joke about Alex training Yashie up to be some kind of mindless, obedient soldier? Well, that's what she's like with him. She does anything he says, doesn't even think about it… Jesus, Flame, how can you just talk like he's not here?

I let my eyes slide to Alex's face and my fingers touched his forehead gently.

"Ok sorry," Dorsey said more softly, "You're doing the whole run away so you can cope thing. Right." She sighed, running her hands through her hair and holding her head.

"I knew he'd look after her," she murmured, "At least, I thought he would…"


	30. Chapter 30 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

***

Blackheath waited in the empty shuttered house for them to return. He had the plane tickets booked, he only needed Dorsey and there was nothing stopping him going back and finding their daughter. They would all be together again for the first time in over a year. He thought back to when it had last been that way.

They had lived right on the river, an old cottage whose backyard rambled unfenced through the bush, and the thought of their young daughter wandering down to the water was always on his mind.

Dorsey had a dance class on Thursday afternoons, and he had carried their child down to the river, trapping her legs together against his body with one elbow, and she threw one arm around his shoulder and leant into his arm, gazing at the passing scenery.

It was dry til you got within metres of the riverbank. Then there was a tunnel of greenery concealing the lazy, sparkling water, and the life surrounding it: a heron flying off in an explosion of long white wings, the bright blue blur of the kingfisher, the dark flick of a frog kicking away beneath the ripples. At the ford the river spread out in display, and only a few balding trees had survived the passing mobs of cattle and people, letting swathes of sunlight wash the water. Here the water was only knee deep, and the current a gentle tug, slowly sinking your feet into the sand.

He relaxed his grip to let her slip to the ground, standing gingerly in the rough rocky sand in her bare feet. She looked up at him questioningly; he never went near the river. And so, when she could hear the other kids swinging and splashing and shrieking, she'd only listen longingly. She knew there were just some things her family didn't do.

He pulled off his shirt and took her hand.

"I think it's time you learnt how to swim. What do you reckon?"

She nodded hopefully.

"Alright. But this will be our little secret ok? We're not even going to tell Mummy."

He watched her expression cloud momentarily, though no cloud sullied the sun. She was no stranger to secrets. Ever since she could talk, what she shouldn't say was impressed on her just as much as what she could say. But never had she known something that had to be kept from her mother. They had always done everything together, the three of them. But the afternoon was hot, and her confidence in her father unshakeable. She squeezed his hand and followed him into the water.

And for months they had kept their secret close and quiet between them, how to float so your mouth was always just above the slapping wet, how to hold your face under the skin of the water, how to strike against it with arms and feet to keep it below you and you above. Then one day Dorsey had walked home along the river bank.

The first thing Blackheath had known of it, he had been escaping from a particularly forceful explosion of kicking, pulling swiftly through the water to the shallows, standing grinning and turning his back to shield him from the drenching spray, and he had recognized Dorsey's face hanging where the bushes started to reclaim the river bank. He would never forget the expression on her face. Crying silently, watching her child swimming strongly, as if he had taken everything of importance from her and smashed it. Like she had nothing left.

She had said nothing, just disappeared and walked up to the house. The words had come later, when their child was safely asleep.

"I thought you said you couldn't swim," she said, her voice dangerously quiet, her words relentless, "You lied to me. You've been lying to me for years. How much longer were you going to keep it up? You think I'm that dumb I'd never figure it out?"

He could find nothing to say. He could feel her drawing away, and while he stood still and quiet, he could feel something inside him stretching after her, desperate to stay close. He was afraid of saying anything, doing anything, that would make her draw away more quickly. And what could he say? He had lied to her. But had he told her he had let her sister drown, he knew he would have lost her then and there, and losing Dorsey was something his heart refused to contemplate. But in the end, it was the lie that drove her from him.

She had left the next day, taking a part of him with her. He had never felt whole since.

Even this morning, she had hardly said a word to him, listening to what he wanted silently, holding herself away from him still. Riding behind him on the snowmobile, she had kept herself apart, her frame a stiff cage behind him. It wasn't til he had to concentrate hard on the steep climbs and narrow turns of the hills that she had released her resentment and melted into his back, laying her cheek on the back of his shoulder like it were some cherished thing. As if she could only give in to her feelings for him when she knew he wasn't paying attention. It had warmed him more than she would ever know, this little glowing knowledge that, whatever else she felt about him, she cared a little for him still.

And a lot for their daughter, to risk herself this way, to come with him. But then, when they had arrived back at Flame's house she had stopped him.

"You haven't told her, have you," she asked tightly.

"No."

"Don't tell her."

"Ok. Why not?"

"I'll tell her. I just… I just haven't told her about… about our daughter."

He was stunned. Was she that ashamed of him that she wouldn't even tell her sister about their child? But something in the way she held herself together, drawing into herself, not away from him, made him realize it wasn't that.

"Why not," he asked, trying to keep the hurt from his voice.

"I don't know… she'll think… I would feel like I was abandoning her like I abandoned _him._" Only the 'him' was so quiet that he barely heard it. He had to think for a while, but then realized she was referring to the baby she had lost long ago, in prison. He knew the decision had haunted her, but he had never realized it still affected her so much. It explained a lot about how she reacted to the pregnancy, the birth, afterwards… he had known she was anxious, but had thought it was the nerves of a first time mother, alone in a new land. He had thought if he took over as much as he could of the work of caring for the baby, she wouldn't be overwhelmed, she would see that she could cope. He wondered now if he had done the wrong thing, and made it harder for her to feel their child was her own. Really her own. Not given her the chance to be the mother she wanted to be, but was afraid that she was not. And now, his actions had made her leave him, and she had fulfilled her worst fears; abandoning her child again. But perhaps she thought it was better that way, that he would better look after her, like he had all along.

Only, he had not looked after her.

He had lost her.

***

Flame drove Dorsey back from the hospital and arrived at the same time as the taxi for the airport. He watched as Dorsey hugged her goodbye and got into the taxi, leaving her alone in the snow. Flame had immediately wrapped her arms around herself, her face tight. He recognized the ache in her bones, the need to be whole again. She had brought him Dorsey. He would have to do what he could for her. He stepped forward, decided.

"About Alex." She flinched as he said the word. "You need to go looking for him."

She looked at him, puzzled, like he was speaking another language. She knew where he was. He never left. Blackheath tried again.

"You need to look inside his mind."

Her eyes widened as she understood, her head beginning to shake in refusal.

"You've done it before," he insisted quietly, wondering at himself for pressing the issue. But he knew Alex, and he knew Flame, and he knew that this was the only way left.

"I can't," Flame whispered.

He turned away, shaking his head. He'd have thought she was beyond that by now. She always ran away til the last possible moment. But Alex needed her to fight this one. She was all he had left.


	31. Chapter 31 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

***

"We're not looking for him," I assured her. Her lack of confidence in my words oozed from the tension in her stance and her refusal to meet my eyes. I tried again.

"He's going to be looking for you right? So if we look for you too, he's more likely to find us. We'll be in the same place."

She looked at me finally, completely lost.

"Just trust me on this."

Her eyes doubted still, but at least she was looking at me. That was a start.

"Ok, where's the first place he's going to look for you?"

There was no answer, and I felt we were back to when I first met her.

"Where you said you'd meet him, right? Do you remember where that is? Can you show me?"

She considered this lengthily.

"Is it a secret place?"

She shook her head. Thought about it. Picked up the car keys and put them in my hand and made for the door.

***

"This is where you were supposed to meet him?"

She nodded.

It was a good hiding place. Souls would never see any reason to venture inside. The grimy windows let in a sickly yellow light that barely reached the corners of the space. The floor was grey with dust and spiders had taken over every angle. The land around had reverted to parkland all the way down to the river.

Right, so he had left her here, and gone to do something else; look for her Mum? But then something had happened and he hadn't come back.

"Is your Daddy late sometimes? Does he get held up, sometimes?"

She perused the insides of the building thoughtfully before replying.

"Sometimes he's late, but he always comes back."

Ok, but this time he's really late, and so she gets picked up by the Seekers and brought to the Healing Centre.

"Why didn't your Dad ask for you at the Healing Centre?"

But this was another question that required careful consideration.

"He doesn't like Healing Centres," she said finally.

"Ah."

A phobia of Healing Centres. Interesting.

There was nothing more this place could tell us, and I felt her begin to fidget the longer we stayed. I took her home and the fidgeting stopped.

I returned there alone later that night and left a note, headed by a picture of a small black cat.

In case you come back

Because you left something small behind here

It's safe with me

46559473


	32. Chapter 32 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

***

He locked the hotel room door behind him as Dorsey shed her shirt and sank onto a bed, flapping her tank top. It was stinking hot, and the tiny airconditioner did nothing. He tugged off his shirt and balled it into a corner, pacing up and down under Dorsey's watchful gaze, feeling the sweat sliding down the flat of his belly. The more she watched him, the less he could relax. He wished like hell they'd got two rooms. But that would have looked odd for the single woman booking.

The long plane journey had been hard on his leg. He had had to pretend to be asleep, his face covered with a hat, to avoid the risk of being recognized by a passenger. So when his leg started to ache, he couldn't walk it out down the cabin. Now finally they'd reached the safety of a hotel room, and his whole body screamed to lie flat and succumb to sleep, but his spasming thigh had to be dealt with first.

"Here," Dorsey said finally, pushing him onto the other bed and pressing the balls of her thumbs through the hard muscles. He curled up, biting back a grunt of pain.

"Would you relax?" she muttered, shoving his shoulder back down into the bed. _Easier said than done_, he thought, pressing the back of hands to his forehead.

"You should've told them you had a medical condition," she said, frowning harder, "Got us better seats."

"I got first available," he said, struggling to keep his mind calm, his muscles loose. He was so close now, he craved being able to just walk out and look for her. But it was still light outside, people everywhere, too much risk of him being seen.

"So you going to tell me what happened?" Dorsey said quietly. It was the first time they'd been alone and able to talk since he'd picked her up. She knew he had lost their daughter, and needed her help to find her. But as to how and why, she was still in the dark.

"I had a meeting in the city. I left her hidden while I went to it. There were complications… a disagreement, I had to get out of there. But I got a one way trip back to the Soul-free zone. She got left behind."

Her fingers dug into his thigh.

"And you just left her? How long ago was this? Why didn't you just come straight back, how could you leave her here-"

He sighed through gritted teeth.

"I was unconscious when they found me," he said, shifting his leg out of her grasp.

"What do you mean you were unconscious? Would you just talk straight with me!"

"I got shot. I hid in a truck. The truck took off," he said shortly, "They found me when they were unpacking it. In the Soul-free zone. I got back as soon as I could. But I can't look for her properly here. You can."

"Jesus. She's been alone for what… months? She could be dead She could be-"

Finally he sat up, caught her wrists, and held her still.

"She's not dead. She's here. I checked the news stories as soon as I got back into the city. She was put in the healing system. She'll still be there, or she'll have been fostered."

He didn't mention the possibility that she had been implanted already. He didn't want to consider that until he had to.

"Well what the fuck are we waiting for?," she pulled her hands out of his grasp, and something fell inside him to see her pulling away from him so easily, "let's go get her now!"

He closed his eyes and let himself drop back onto the bed.

"Visitors hours close at 5," he said, keeping his voice still, and though it was still bright outside, it was 7 at night, "We can't do anything til morning."

He could feel her trying to calm down, sitting on the other bed, digesting this information.

"And then what?" she said quietly.

He shrugged unhappily. This was not a question for him to answer. That was up to her. But she was asking, which meant only one answer he could think of.

"We go on like before."

"What, and you'll look after her?" she said, voice rearing, "You'll take her to your frikkin meetings so _she_ can get shot next time?"

He hated that he loved her even when she was being impossible. It wasn't fair.

"I'm not asking you to stay," he said quietly.

"No you wouldn't, would you," she muttered, shoulders falling, "How _can_ I stick around while you kill people meaninglessly."

"It's not meaninglessly-"

"But it is, isn't it? You're not getting anywhere. Is there even a plan anymore? It's just random killings-"

"They have to know we feel strongly-"

"Oh I think they get that part!"

"I cannot just sit by and do nothing-" he sat up angrily, facing her across the narrow space. You can't argue lying down. Not properly.

"But they're already here, why can't you accept that? The past is the past. Why can't you just deal with the present?"

"And just forget about all the lives they stole? Do they mean nothing?"

"They're not implanting us anymore."

"So far. The moratoriums are not definite"

"They've been extended twice! They may as well be!"

"And what about their children? They are human too. Their own children!"

"And that justifies you killing them? Children included? It's alright for you to kill them, so long as they don't get implanted?"

He said nothing, and the response she saw in it made her stand up, furious.

"Because dying _would_ be preferable to you, wouldn't it, than getting implanted? And you assume it's the same for everyone – for my daughter!"

"Our daughter," he muttered, though a voice in his head hissed _My Daughter_.

"Jesus! Bhask got implanted, and he survived, but I don't see a whole lot of people surviving death! Get your frikkin priorities right!"

"So what are your priorities?" he asked sourly, if only to take the spotlight off him. But she didn't respond, sighing and sitting back down again, looking at him with haunted eyes.

"It's crazy," she shrugged, "And at the end of the day, it's pointless, isn't it. All that you achieve is killing random people. All you'll do is get yourself killed… and get her killed."

The distance between the two beds was small, but it seemed unspannable to him, til she reached forward slowly and drew her finger down his chest, watching the trail it made through the sweat. Her face was sad and longing. His whole body screamed to touch her. Did she know the trail of fire she left through his heart?

He caught her hand and she let him, curling her fingers round his.

"Don't do this to me," he muttered, looking away, exposing the vein throbbing in his neck. Her hand stilled in his. "Don't make me believe you love me then take off again."

"I didn't leave you because I didn't love you," she whispered. Then a small, hopeless smile played on her lips.

"I think I've loved you ever since I first saw you at that stupid congress-" she murmured.

"And I ignored you."

"Yeah. And you're still running away from me. I can't just let you do this. I hate being away from you. I hate it."

"I hate it too."

Exhaustion washed over him, and he no longer had the strength to fight it.

"We can't do anything til dark anyway," she said softly, pulling away from him again and lying down on the single bed, "Get some rest."

***

He woke up empty of tiredness, staring at the wall. It was the deep silent dark of the midnight hours, when the daytime world seems to have disappeared. The street lights painted their slanted lines on the wall, but his body clock was still on a different rhythm, and couldn't recognize the dark as night.

Dorsey had shifted from the single bed and lay alongside him, the entire length of her body never more than 2 inches away from him, but never less. Her closeness made his muscles contract warily, and any small chance he'd had of getting back to sleep was obliterated by the stress of being so close to her. Refusing to give up, he continued to stare at the wall, hating how he reacted to her, hating that he loved her still. The still night slowly grew cooler until he could feel the sweat drying, stretching tight across his shoulders.

He got up and drowned himself in the shower spray, washing off the thought of her along with the tightness on his skin.

"You love me," she said, and her voice was inches away, not in the next room where by rights it should have been.

"Jesus, woman," he muttered, turning and seeing her standing in the doorway, getting ready to join him. He backed away carefully, glaring at the wall. What was she playing at? Why couldn't she just leave him alone?

"You hardly slept. You've just been lying there all stiff," she said, stepping into the shower bay. She had been watching him then, as awake as he had been. Damn body clocks. Why did his have to be synchronized to hers tonight?

"Maybe I hate you," he said tensely. He imagined letting her push him up against the wall, pressing her body to his, cupping her perfect shoulders in his hands.

"You hate that you need me," she replied easily, "but you don't hate me."

_Bitch_, he thought, wandering how she could know.

"Tell me you love me," she said, leaning forward into the spray.

"Tell me you won't leave me again," he said, resisting moving towards her. His body may ache for her, but his heart would not let her hurt him again.

"Tell me you don't want to kill my sister," she countered, and caught the disturbance this caused in his face. She stilled, intrigued by this revelation.

"You really don't, do you? You don't want to kill her," she breathed.

He said nothing.

"Tell me you do then. Say it."

He pushed past her, grabbed his towel and his jeans and escaped into the bedroom. It was impossible to argue naked. She let him go, deep in thought at this new turn in him. He felt better able to handle her clothed in his jeans and a fresh wave of determination. Until she came out of the bathroom.

She knelt on the single bed, towel wrapped around her body, accentuating her collarbones and shoulders, and he knew her skin would be still warm and damp from the shower. He couldn't help but think of the countless times she had knelt on him that way, arms wrapped around his shoulders, cradling his head. He could feel her shoulders in his palms, trace the graceful bones that led there with his fingertips… his hands balled into fists to rid themselves of the memories that plagued him.

"Why can't you admit it? Why is it so hard for you to admit this?" she asked softly. She was so much harder to fight when she was soft.

"She's a Soul and Souls are barbaric, thieving, two-faced, fuckin parasitic invaders-" his flow was interrupted as she moved over and sat on his knees, her knees beside his hips. He could smell her skin like a night-time flower opening after rain. He didn't move away, but he didn't give an inch either.

"Forget about them. Tell me about Flame. Tell me you think Flame's a thieving, two-faced parasite."

He couldn't. He knew she was not. Flame had always been open to him, ready to sacrifice whatever she could, even after he had held a gun to her head.

"Tell me you'd do the same thing again, if you saw her tomorrow; you'd let her drown."

Her towel had fallen around her hips and he struggled to keep his eyes from wandering. His hands levitated to her hips.

"You use unfair methods, woman," he muttered.

She wrapped her towel around herself more tightly and removed his hands from the curve of her hips, holding them firm between hers.

"You wouldn't, would you?" she whispered.

"No," he admitted finally.

She could read that this was the truth in his troubled eyes, the thorn that this pressed into the soft underbelly of his ideals. She released his hands to wrap her arms around his head and kissed him gently and lengthily, like drinking in the tiny icy stream from a subterreanean spring.

"I forgive you," she whispered. And he lost himself to her.

***

He woke with his arms around her still, and hers folded like wings snug between their chests. She was awake and staring at him, blowing on his eyelids. He pressed his face into the mattress to escape her, tightening his grip around her as if he could press her into obedience and keep her yet. But she slipped out of his leaden embrace and pulled the sheets off him.

"Come on, it'll be light soon," she harried.

"What have you done to me, woman?" he groaned, feeling as if he had never slept, his limbs weighted with fatigue, "go away."

"No, we're getting up. Now."

His body didn't care what the clock said. It was sure it was 1am, and dragged him back towards the deep sleep of the early morning. He trapped a pillow over his ears and started to drift away in the hot muffled silence beneath. Until she tugged it away and threw it on the floor.

"You are going to show me where you left her."

***

They walked along by the side of the river, the smell of damp river weed sweating on the banks in the dark. Hunting night herons watched them beadily from branches shrouded in shadows. Near and far, the calls of frogs penetrated the darkness, a patchwork of small territories the diametre of a croak.

He thought of the river by their old house, the golden afternoons in secret swimming lessons. The rivers, the sense of loss, Dorsey, their daughter, all seemed intertwined like negative and photograph. That afternoon, everything had come apart. This morning it would all begin to come together again.

"This is where you left her?" she said, looking into the abandonned church, the moonlight falling through the dust and illuminating the emptiness inside the building, hiding the cobwebs and decay.

He said nothing, but his silence spoke plenty to her. A patch of white shone reflecting the creamy moonlight: a folded piece of paper with a familiar cat drawn on its centre.

"Dorsey no!" he hissed, but she was too quick, padding through the moonbeams light as a cat.

She grabbed the note and read it mutely, devouring every word.


	33. Chapter 33 Flame

**Flame**

***

"The first thing I would experience would be his last memory?" I asked. The Healers nodded. "Well, the last thing he would remember would be drowning. I, I don't know that I could… cope with that."

My core froze at just the thought.

"You just need to remember it's not real," the Healer said, "It's only a memory. We can block any memory you don't want later."

It wasn't the later I was worried about. It was the during: the drowning part. But I looked at Alex's deathly still face, at Yashie sitting beside him, all of us waiting, waiting, waiting for something, and knew I had to do it. I was so sick of waiting. I couldn't bear to watch Alex not live any longer.

"Ok," I said, and before I knew it, I was lying in a gurney with the anaesthetic spray descending on me, screaming inside that I wasn't ready. But I knew I never would be ready, so what did it matter?

***

The water was so cold I felt it as pain. I gasped involuntarily and water hit my lungs like a wall of lightening. My head felt like it had crystallized instantly, as if, if I flicked it, it would shatter into a thousand pieces. The ice cut out most of the sunlight, and the rays that dug into the water were murky with sediment. I couldn't breathe, my chest expanding and contracting frantically on nothing, and I knew the feeling too, too well; my own memories clouding my experience of this one. I could see the surface, covered in ice, but I was sinking deeper, and trapped in the memory, there was nothing I could do to change events. It was worse than a nightmare, because I could _feel_ thatI was dying, my body shrieking all its painful warnings to the same tune: I was dying…

The vision, the sensations, faded abruptly, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in my own body.

"You weren't coping," the Healer said, "We pulled you out. Was it the drowning memory?"

I nodded, wrapping my arms around my legs, still shivering.

"There, you're back now," she said, as I rested my head on knees, marvelling at the feel of air flowing easily and speedily, in and out of my lungs.

"Did you see anything that could be pertinent to the case?" the Seeker spoke up.

"There's a case?" I murmured, "You… you suspect foul play?"

"There's … there are inconsistencies. Loose ends, we'd like to tie up. There were similar… events in many Soul-free zones across the globe that day. It seems the humans were having a protest day of their own."

"When you're ready we'll try again."

***

When I woke up the second time, I saw my own body lying on the hospital gurney opposite. Alive. Dry. Far, far away from that lake. It was strange to look upon my body from the outside, like a mirror but back to front, and no glass. But it wasn't as strange as being in Alex's body. I covered my face with my hands, trying to push away the memories, but flinched at the sensation of my big, thick hands on my face. I knew the feel of those hands, intimately, and the feel of that face, but not this way. This way was too, too strange. This was wrong.

"Daddy?"

Yashie propped her palms on my chest and craned to look into my face.

"Daddy!" she gasped and threw herself onto me in the tiniest bear hug.

"Hey, my little malsha," I whispered uncertainly, my voice deep and Alex-like, holding her to me hesitantly with one huge hand. This was incredibly weird.

"Mummy, Daddy's back!"

"Hey, hey, don't wake up Mummy," I said, catching her wrists. She looked at my hands around her wrists. "Mummy's sleeping, right? Just, just let her sleep, ok?" She pulled her hands out of my grasp and sat silently, watching me out of the corner of her eye. _Not good_.

I sat up carefully as a nurse hurried in.

"I've called for the Healers," she said breathlessly, noting my readings, "how are you feeling?"

"Like I've been underwater for a month," I groaned.

"Well, you should expect to be weak; your muscles haven't moved by themselves for quite some time."

The Healers swept in, closely followed by the Seeker.

"All readings normal so far," the nurse told them, moving away to let them examine me. Yashie was tugging at my sleeve.

"Daddy," she hissed, "wake up Mummy!"

"Yash, leave Mummy alone for a minute, ok?" I said, as the Healers hushed me so they could listen to my chest better. Alex's chest. I did not feel comfortable in his body, the size of it, the way it moved. I did not like the feel of their instruments cold on his skin. I loved his body, but it was a different thing entirely to be seeing from this side. The sooner I could get out of here the better.

"What did you see?" The Seeker asked. I breathed deeply, frowning, going over the painful memories, putting them back in order, starting at the beginning.

"He went into town to pick us up from the plane. He thought we were on the plane…"

His memory unreeled before my eyes. He had dropped into the council a few days before, the guy at reception had wanted to speak to him…

_"There was a message for you here somewhere… ah nuts," he shoved at the papers covered the bench, " Your family…"_

_"They're coming?" Alex asked, two parts trepidation and one part hope._

_"Yeah yeah, they coming…"_

"_On Sunday-"_

"_Yeah, they said they was coming on the Sunday plane-"_

_Alex grinned and slapped the counter top, awash with joy._

"_Alright!"_

He hadn't got my message properly. He thought we were coming up this Sunday, not next Sunday.

"What did he do in town?" the Seeker prompted.

"Ah, he just stopped to pick up some lolly bags… for the kids…" I remembered his blissful anticipation, matched by the beauty of the day, the clear, wide sky, reaching on forever over the frozen land, bathed in light. He loved the way the cold air bit at his chest, the painful diamond sparkle of the sunlight in the unsullied snow… He had thought it fitting that our first day there we would be welcomed with the most glorious autumn day the north had to offer.

"Then he heard the news…" I went on, my smile fading. I could see group of men edging towards him. Law enforcement and that Jim from council. Approaching hesitantly, avoiding his gaze. He waited for them, listening to crunch of their footsteps in the grit encrusted snow of the town roads, unnaturally loud in the winter Sunday stillness. He knew already something was up.

"They told him the plane had crashed in the lake, that there wouldn't be any survivors. He… he thought we were on that plane. He thought we were dead." I could feel the horrific gaping loss from the memory, the sense that my chest was entirely empty, my blood running backwards. "They wanted him to ID the bodies when the divers got them out."

"Did they think it was an accident?"

"Uh… they used the word accident… but they said it funny, like they weren't sure. Then someone else said, later, someone else said, they didn't think it was…"

I remembered the emergency services shed, where the glaring rays of the arctic sun were severed by the grimy glass, people running through the dimness, phones ringing constantly. Alex was staring at a map showing the lake where the plane had crashed, a long narrow tongue of water, water filling a line in the rock. I'd seen this map before. It was in my kitchen, with his boots and clothes, and a lolly bag. Alex hadn't been able to look away from the empty space on the paper where he thought our lives had been erased, sucked into the icy blankness of the lake.

"_Hey Hawkmoth. You heard, then."_

Stu, from the mechanics. Alex recognized him but couldn't move to acknowledge him. Stu didn't seem to mind.

"_He flew that route 30 years, give or take. He knew that plane better than his wife. Nah, something's not right. This weren't no accident."_

"_Where was it when it started to go down?"_ Alex had asked, his thoughts grim with understanding.

"_What? Uh…" Stu traced the flight path back up the lake. "About here I reckon. What are you thinking?"_

_His finger had rested near an inlet where a river fed the lake. Alex knew it, the river fell down a drop, and the water wasn't frozen yet. The black water and the waterfall's spray could disguise anyone waiting there with weaponery._

_"Nothing." Alex had pulled the map out of the roll and push out of the overcrowded room._

_"Hawkmoth?" I'd heard Stu call faintly as the doors swung shut, disconnecting the silent white world without from the chaos within._

"What did they think happened, then?" The Seeker asked.

"To the plane? He, uh, he didn't say. But Alex… Alex thought he knew." A conversation with a trapper, far out on a barren plain…

"_We trade stuff all over the arctic. Dog sled in the winter, boat in the summer. Quicker to do trade with Siberia than you southerners. People trust each other more, you know? Neighbours, we are, all across the north. Closest Soul- free zone too."_

_At the time he hadn't thought about it, but now it bothered him, ringing in his mind. What would you trade from Siberia? Nothing that you could get here; deer, seals, fish… the answer finally got his blood running the right way, refilling his empty veins. Weapons. Surface to air missiles. The kind that could take down a plane._

"He thought the humans were trading weapons between Soul-free zones. He'd seen them in Siberia, and he knew people were trading across the Arctic. He thought maybe someone had brought over something that could take down a plane." He didn't think maybe, though; he thought he knew.

"He went to check to see if he was right…" I said, struggling to relive the memory.

"Where did he go?"

_The pain of the glaring light reflecting from all directions off the snow before sunglasses cut the ends off the sharper rays. The shattering noise as he threw the lolly bags onto the back seat and they burst their brown paper skins, scattering sweets like a severed string of pearls. The skid of the wheels on the hard packed snow, the truck gripping and bursting forward, heading for the lake road._

"The lake road…"

_His fists gripping the steering wheel bloodless tight, the all encompassing need to keep everything taut, rigid; holding on because inside everything was in a thousand pieces._

"He kept seeing us in his head, our bodies, in the water."

_Ayasha, hanging in the underwater world, limp and white. Below, in the darker water, me; face down, unmoving, a swirl in the current lifting my blue hand upwards, towards him. Bhask, deeper still where the light was dying, his hair swaying in the dark blue water._

"Where did he go?"

"A waterfall… it's on the map. It's one of the feeder rivers into the lake."

The Seeker nodded.

"That's where they found him," he said quietly. "He drove straight there? Nothing happened on the way?"

"No, uh… no, there was a car…" _A car speeding from the opposite direction wrenching him out of his visions and back into the moment. "A four wheel drive, white…"_

"Did you get a number plate?"

I stared at him mutely. Alex had just been told his entire family was dead, and he expected him to notice a number plate?

"Colours, anything?" he pressed.

I shook my head.

"It was sort of, shiny? Like a rental car…?"

I recognized the suppressed frustration in the set of the Seekers jaw from countless interviews I'd done in the past.

"What happened at the waterfall?" he said.

"There was no one there."

_I remembered Alex jumping out of the truck, staring at the empty lake shore. They were gone. He'd walked up to the rocky edge, the spray from the falling water spitting on his face, the water black and lifeless at the shore line, carved deep by the falls, shut around by the lake ice. There'd been nothing. Nothing but tracks in the snow._

"But then someone came. The car that he'd passed-"

"White four-wheel drive? He was sure it was the same?"

I nodded, seeing the car swing off the road, skidding to a stop beside the truck. Two men got out, clothed entirely in black, the car doors slamming loud in the silence. They were tense, poised to strike, and they move towards Alex carefully.

"Two guys got out. There might have been more inside, I don't know… They were, defensive, I mean aggressive, trying to encircle him or something. Alex was shouting at them. He thought they'd killed us, they'd shot down the plane…" I could feel Alex's rage, his need to meet their threat with his violence.

"Did they say anything?"

"I don't, I don't think so…" I shivered. Their faces were masked, I couldn't see lips moving, and blood roared in Alex's head; the only thing that mattered in whole world was that they would come close enough for him to hurt them. Badly. He waited, muscles itching to snap.

"What happened?"

"They came at him, rushed him, and he went for them, but, but they caught him somehow, and they, they threw him into the water."

_The water was so cold he felt it as pain. He gasped involuntarily and water hit his lungs like a wall of lightening, solid and burning throughout his chest. He couldn't breathe, his lungs expanding and contracting frantically, heaving away on nothing. The water was gloomy under the covering ice, darker as he sank, desperately trying to draw breath so he could think. The world became darker still and the pain of the cold became distant. Then he saw them, below: Ayasha, hanging in the icy water, limp and white. Some metres beneath her; me, a swirl in the current lifting my blue hand upwards, towards him. Bhask, deeper still where the light was gloomy, his hair swaying in the dark blue water._

_Dead. All dead. The burning in his chest ate him from the inside out. _

_Flame… Ayahsa… Bhask…_

_He kicked down towards them, into the darkness._

The Seeker called me back to the present. I pulled Yashie close, trying to stop the shivering.

"Is that all?" the Seeker asked, and I filled in him with what other little details I could remember. Then the Healers claimed my full attention with their tests.

When they'd finally finished with me, I sat up waiting for Bhask to get off work. There was no snow tonight, but the street lights shone reflected from the clouds that blanketed the city, giving the sky a strange, fluffy, grey-pink glow. It was dark, but not yet late, the short winter's days consumed too quickly, as if the sun didn't have the strength to keep the night at bay. Yashie lay beside me, not talking to me, but I was too exhausted and too uncertain in this body to draw her out.

I was supposed to be looking for Alex, but I was so used to living in a body without a mind, I didn't know where to start. I kept myself to the surface of his mind, away from his painful memories, and away from his equally painful hopes and dreams. Maybe tomorrow I would looker deeper for him. Maybe seeing Bhask would give me the strength… but I fell asleep before he came.

I was woken by an absence, and it took me a moment to put it into thought. Yashie's familiar weight at my side had vanished.

"Mummy! Mummy, wake up!" I heard her saying, and replied before I could think about it.

"Yashie, I'm here-" I called to her, sitting up.

Ayasha had pulled the chair up to the other bed, and was leaning over my inert body.

"Yashie?" I said. She gave me a dark look and turned all her attention back on my body.

"Mummy, Ayassie needs you back now, please, _now_. You _said_ only a little sleep, you _said_-"

"Yashie, it's ok baby," I whispered, slowly forcing Alex's hideously weak body to take the few steps over to her. Yashie ignored me, her fists balling up.

"Mummy, come back!" she shouted, and something within me slid in horror as I saw her start to pummel the inert body as hard as she could.

The nurses had crowded into the doorway at her shouts and looked on appalled, and I grabbed her fists and pulled her down to the floor.

"Yashie, No! You do not punch Hungry Flame! You hear me?" but she was out of control, slamming the back of her head into anything she could reach; me, the bed, the floor…

"You are not my Daddy!" she was shrieking, "Mummy! _Mummy_!"

"Get me out of here now! Get me out!" I yelled to the Healers, Alex's voice frighteningly loud, and they scurried to respond. The anesthetic was sprayed liberally over Ayasha and me, and her body finally began to calm as I lost consciousness.

***

I woke up in my own body with Ayasha in my arms, her face tear stained and her head still bruised where she'd bashed it on the floor. I looked over at Alex, lying the same as always, like a pharaoh waiting to be entombed. I caressed Ayasha's head as softly as I could, and she opened her eyes.

"Mummy," she whispered, voice heavy with sedative, and I held her close, rocking her. My poor confused baby.

"Yes, Yashie baby, I'm back. I said I'd be back, and I'm back."

Her arms curled around my arms and held me tight. She pressed her cheek against my neck, turning to glare at Alex with all the force of a furnace. I'd never seen her glare with such hatred at anyone, let alone her beloved Daddy.

"Oh, baby, don't be mad at Daddy-"

"Is not Daddy," she slurred malevolently, burying her face away from the sight of him.

"Oh baby…"

What could I say? She adored her father. I hated to see her hating and fearing him now. But she thought her father was possessed. How could I explain it was me? I was the last solid thing she was clinging to.

"Don't go away again please Mummy," she whispered.

I couldn't bring myself to lie to her.


	34. Chapter 34 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

***

"Hello, Charlotte Grey speaking?" I said, answering the phone after saving my notes file.

"I, I've heard you have a human child staying with you."

It was a very guarded voice, and it instantly got my attention. I waited for a moment before answering.

"Yes, who is this?"

"I'd like to speak to her," he said, still equally wary.

"Just a moment."

I covered the mouthpiece carefully. This felt incredibly irresponsible, but…

"Honey, there's a man on the phone, he won't say who he is but he wants to speak to you. Do you want to speak to him?"

She watched me carefully, wanting to hope, but wary as ever.

"Ask her… ask her if there's an alley cat in the house," the voice said, guessing the reason for the delay. I passed on the message, and her eyes lit up and she reached for the phone. I handed it to her with lingering misgivings, but if it was her father…

"Hello?" she said cautiously, and then a grin of pure joy lit her face. It must be her father. Who else would call so strangely, and make her so happy?

"Yes," she said, a single word in a long joyful silence, and I was amazed that even now she was careful of her words.

"I'm fine."

"I've missed you too."

"No, she's ok." She covered the mouthpiece.

"He wants to know the address here, can I tell him?"

"Of course, do you-" but she was already rabbitting it off by heart.

"Ok."

She hung up.

"Aah, I'm guessing I'm not allowed to ask about that?" I asked as she stood twisting silently in happiness, gripping the disconnected phone in both hands. She turned and hugged me hard. It was the first time she'd ever hugged _me_; usually I was the one who had to hug her. I let my arms fall around her, and let her keep her treasured silence.


	35. Chapter 35 Blackheath

**Blackheath**

***

"Hello?"

It was the most wonderful, vicious pain he'd ever felt to hear her voice.

"Do you know who this is?" he asked quietly. But he trusted her to be discrete.

"Yes."

Her voice was filled with happiness, and he ached with relief to know that she knew him, had missed him, and missed him still.

"Are you ok? Are you hurt or-"

"I'm fine."

"You're really fine? I've missed you so, so much baby…"

"I've missed you too."

"I'm so sorry I didn't meet you. I'm so sorry baby. I can't tell you about it now, but… That lady you're with, she's treating you right? She's not bothering you?"

"No, she's ok."

"I'm coming to get you. I'll… I'll send someone. Someone you know. Can you tell me where you are?"

She had to ask, but then reeled off the address. It would be forever burnt to his memory, but he wrote it the back of his hand anyway.

"Ok, baby. That's perfect. Hang in there, ok? We're coming for you. I'll see you soon."

"Ok." She hung up. He stared at the phone, elation spinning his thoughts like an upturned bicycle wheel.

"And?" Dorsey said, all anxiousness.

He showed her the address, she grabbed the car keys, and he grabbed her.

"Wait," he said, "Don't just drive straight down there. Drive past it first. Look at the parked cars. Look at the guys mowing their lawns-"

"Alright! I get it!" she said, shaking him off.

"If it looks ok, come back and pick me up."

She gave him a worried look.

"Of course I'll stay in the car!" he said, exasperated.


	36. Chapter 36 Flame

**Flame**

***

"The tests results all show that the brain is quite functional, there's no major long term damage there," the Healers said, waving at colourful, meaningless scans. "Did you not ever get a sense of him?"

I sighed. I had been so preoccupied my other things… his memories, his body, Ayasha…

"Maybe, maybe when I saw Ayasha hitting my body, there was something…"

"We know he's not conscious. You won't find him in the conscious mind. You need to go into the subconscious."

"I don't understand what that means. I don't know how to do that."

"It's very difficult to do when you're conscious. It might be easiest when you're asleep."

"You mean, when I'm dreaming?"

"Your dreams are a visualization of your subconscious thought. It might make it easier for you to grasp the concept if your work through your dreams."

I felt like a 3 year old. Why couldn't I get this?

"It's his last chance, Hungry Flame. If you can't find him there…"

"Alright, I'll go back."

***

We had decided it would be best if Ayasha was kept asleep while I tried one last time to find Alex. I smoothed her curls as she lay limp in Bhask's arms.

"You'll look after her for me," I said softly.

"You'll do it yourself in half a second," Bhask said gruffly.

"Will you stay with me? Hold my hand? Well, hold Alex's hand?"

"I'm not going anywhere."

My wonderful boy.

I nodded to the Healers and tried to relax as I drifted into unconsciousness.

This time, I was prepared for the memories, and could wall myself away from them until I surfaced into consciousness in a dark hospital room. Bhask was curled around Ayasha on the bed opposite, his arm stretching across the space between us, still holding Alex's hand. My hand. His eyes watched me silently. I squeezed his hand gently and tried to go to sleep.

But it's so hard to go to sleep when you're trying to. And my mind was filled with restless thoughts. The last thing he had known, Alex was drowning in a remote lake in the distant north, trapped under the ice. He could not have believed he would survive. He was unconscious when they found him, he'd had nothing to tell him he had been saved.

If you believed you were dead, did you die? Your body might not die, but your mind…

I was beginning to think I'd never get to sleep, but the next thing I knew, I was dreaming.

I knew I was dreaming, because I saw my own body swimming in a vast body of water, relaxed, purposeful. So it wasn't my dream either. My dreams about water were not like this at all. I watched fascinated as this woman carved through the surface, her body undulating as naturally as the water itself, her movements smooth and powerful. This had been me, once. It felt a long time ago. A different world.

But if this was Alex's dream; where was Alex? There was no sense of him here. I looked at the glittering water with rising dread. I knew where he would think he would be. Under the water. Where he thought he'd never left.

_This is a dream, this a dream_, I reminded myself, trying to control my fear, but the dream began to dissolve the more I concentrated. I let go, afraid I would lose the dream completely, and with it, any chance of finding Alex. This was Alex's dream, so he must be here… I just needed to let myself relax, let go, let the inputs from Alex's mind guide me. But I didn't want to let go; I was afraid of his memories, and afraid of losing that barrier between myself and him, of losing who I was. An old fear. At the same time, I knew it didn't matter that I was afraid. I had to do it anyway.

I felt myself sinking into the water, the cold blue darkness rising about my chest, my neck, my head. I fought back my own memories and let myself sink deeper and deeper. But the deeper I sank the sharper my panic grew, til I hovered, torn between the desire to rocket to the surface as fast as possible, and the knowledge that the deeper I went, the closer I became to Alex. My eye strained to find the bottom, to find an end. And there, so deep it was just a deeper shade of darkness, a blurry form had taken shape.

_Alex_.

My hearted ached to be with him and I let myself sink deeper into the darkness.


	37. Chapter 37 Charlotte

**Charlotte**

***

The doorbell rang and she froze as I got up to answer it, half hidden behind the couch. A tall, stunning human woman stood in the doorway, a tattoo of a black cat on her shoulder.

"Mum!"

She ran out from behind the couch and torpedoed the woman in the knees.

"Oh, baby," the woman wrapped her in her long, graceful arms, her face fierce with longing.

"Dorsey," she said finally, extending her hand.

"Charlotte," I said immediately, doing likewise.

"Mum!" her daughter said at the same time, horrified.

"Oh I think we can trust her with that much, baby, after all she's done. You'll need it for the paperwork anyway, I assume."

I smiled, but was momentarily speechless. I suddenly realised this was the end.

"Thank you so much for looking after her. I, uh, I hope she hasn't been any trouble."

A child less bothersome I'd never encountered. "She's an angel. I'm just so glad we found you. Is her father here too?"

They both stilled almost imperceptibly.

"We don't talk about her father. I hope you don't think we're rude."

"Well, he must be desperate to see her," I said, hugging her little body goodbye. "Any time you want to throw a ball for Sammy, you know where I am."

She hugged me back tightly.

"You can't watch us go," she whispered. I nodded silently, holding onto my tears, and went back to sit on the couch. She was leaving. This little body that had seemed by now a part of the furniture. I knew she had never been for keeps. I knew it was best for her to be with family. But my sense of loss wouldn't be rationalized.

And when I looked up, they were gone.


	38. Chapter 38 Flame

**Flame**

***

Alex was lying on the bottom of the lake, asleep. I reached out to shake his shoulders, and he was deathly, deathly cold. My throat constricted, but then, slowly, he opened his eyes.

"Alex…" I breathed, and true to dream form, no bubbles escaped my lips. His eyes held mine, confused. I pulled him so he was sitting up, and his body was limp beneath my touch, swaying like weed. I slid my hands down his arms, despairing at their icyness, til I came to his hands. Then I smiled. His right hand was warm. Bhask. Bhask was still holding on to his hand. I took this hand in mine and rubbed at it, smiling at Alex. He looked from his hand to my face.

"Yashie misses you," I told him, kicking away from the lake bottom and pulling him up with me, "you have to wake up now please." I felt the dream dissolving around me, and hurried to wake first.

"Bhask," I hissed, squeezing his hand. He eased away from Ayasha and hovered next to me, eyes fraught, "I found him! Get the Healers to get me out. I don't want him to wake up with me here."

He nodded and ran for the Healers. I could feel Alex waking inside me. I pinched my hand to remind him he was alive.

_You keep coming, damn you_, I thought. _Don't make me come back in here_. And then the Healers arrived and put me out.

And this time when I woke up, I was in my body, Yashie snuggled by my side.

"Hey little baby," I grinned at her, unable to resist the temptation to wake her. She scowled at me sleepily, then her eyes opened wider.

"Mummy?"

"Of course it's Mummy," I laughed, hugging her tight. She wrapped her arms round my neck.

"Mummymummymummymummy," she murmured. _My baby didn't need a vocabulary_, I thought happily, _we knew exactly what she meant_.

I pulled myself up, and glanced over at Alex, half afraid to look. Bhask sat next to him, holding his hand in both of his. And Alex 's eyes were open, his beautiful blue-grey eyes. Watching mine, and smiling.


	39. Epilogue

Epilogue

*

**Charlotte**

***

I entered my final notes into the case file. Out of pure curiosity, I did a search of the databases for Dorsey, adult female human. A list of photos came up and I scrolled through them til I recognized her. Her file opened, marked with a flashing red tag. I clicked on it.

**Known associate of Blackheath.**

I followed the link associated with his name

**Wanted in connection for conspiring and committing numerous violent acts against Souls. If seen, do not approach. Report immediately to Seekers.**

A list of attacks he had been involved in followed, but I saw only one

**14. Canberra, March 15th, Garema Place. Explosive device detonated causing 12 deaths and 57 injured.**

**Deceased:**

**Paige Robertson 56**

**Ryan Matthews, 43**

**Olivia Knight, 34**

**Emily Knight, 6**

**Chloe Knight, 3**


End file.
